by Bobby Adair
“Quiet,” he whispered.
His demons resituated and grew still. William looked out the window at two shirtless men, marked in bloody handprints, talking loudly and slapping one another on the back as they strutted down the street.
In a boisterous voice, more suited for a tavern full of drunks than a ruined city teeming with dangerous demons, one of them told the other, “Our god has led us to another day of victory!”
“I bathe in their blood,” said the shorter of the two.
“You could paint yourself in it and never be strong!” The loud one laughed.
“Maybe not, but I’ll be immortal.”
William glanced behind him. His demons swayed and hissed. They wanted to feed. But he couldn’t let them. Not now.
“Wait,” he whispered. “It’s not safe.”
The demons watched him with hungry eyes, but they obeyed.
It’d been days since he’d last seen Melora, Ivory and the strange, twisted man named Jingo. Since then, William’s demons had become his family. They slept closely at night to keep one another warm in the winter chill. They hunted together and shared what they killed. None starved among his demon band. They didn’t burn one another on the pyre. They didn’t murder their kind. None was inferior to the others because of a silly made-up title.
William was above the rest, only because they looked to him for answers and decisions. They understood that he was smart enough to provide for them, even though he was just a boy. To the degree that their simple minds understood the concept, they respected him.
That was something he’d have never found in Brighton, even if he somehow avoided the pyre. The thought of Brighton brought with it the smells of blazing wood and burned flesh, making him want to spit.
William no longer wanted anything to do with Brighton, and he wanted nothing to do with its people.
The demons were his brothers.
Together with his demon band, William had been tracking the strange army for days, following their hardened boot tracks in the mud, skirting around dead human bodies and the carcasses of his new kind. This strange new army out of Brighton was bent on slaughter. They seemed to fight with no discipline, but zealous rage, and they rode their crazed frenzy to victory in every skirmish. They were something to fear.
He needed to find out more about them.
He watched the men wander down the road. They were heading toward the enormous, dome-shaped building that he remembered seeing when he’d first reached the Ancient City. It was about eighty yards away, diagonal from William, set back from the other buildings on the opposite side of the road and separated by a large, overgrown field. The last of the sun’s light glanced off the rusted steel girders that curved over the top. Sloped pieces of concrete rose around the building’s edges, holding rows of concrete and metal that might’ve once seated spectators. William had never seen a building as large or as wide, either in Brighton or here. Even in disrepair, the building was remarkable.
He recalled Bray’s words. The Ancients used it to play games.
The Wardens call it the Ancient Circle.
Remembering that discussion led William to think about Bray. He hadn’t seen Bray since the Warden had killed his mother. William’s anger still seethed when he thought of Ella’s lifeless, bleeding body. The memories tormented him almost every night, when he was scraping away piles of rubble, trying to clear a place to sleep. During those times, he staved off tears, hating himself for his human frailties.
But days of wandering the Ancient City had given him time to think. Bray had saved William and Ella. He’d protected them when the people of Brighton surely would’ve killed them.
He’d taught William to track, and he’d helped them find Melora. He’d battled off the soldiers.
Why had Bray killed Ella? William hoped to figure it out in time.
Loud chanting drew his attention back to the dome.
The army was inside.
The entrance to the dome, once protected by glass, was now open, a gaping mouth through the tall sidewall of the Ancient Circle, giving William a view inside. Through the deepening shadows and the orange flame of campfires, William saw the silhouettes of hundreds, some facing one another, talking, perhaps, others squatted around the fires, doing things he couldn’t guess. Disturbed, William realized he could see only a small section of the interior.
Within the aging structure, there had to be thousands he couldn’t view.
Who was leading them? There was always a leader—at least, that’s the way it worked in Brighton. They had to be from Brighton. But William had an unfounded suspicion that nagged at him. What if they were the Ancients, come to reclaim their city? That speculation caused William to look at all of them wildly, fearing they might be using ancient contraptions to track him. But none of the people seemed to be looking in his direction. None were alarmed. They were dressed in clothing that he couldn’t imagine the Ancients would show themselves in.
Some of the men were bare-chested. The women wore ragged clothes. Maybe they were an army of settlers. If so, they were larger than any group William had imagined in the wild. The army’s chants floated to the building in which he was hiding. He caught pieces of what they were saying, but none of it made sense.
“We are the children of a new god!”
“We will live forever!”
Could these ragged, vicious people truly be immortal?
William needed to learn more, and that meant, as dangerous as it was, he needed to get closer.
But not while there was still light in the sky.
He waited until the sun was finally below the horizon and he could barely see the sword in his hands before he turned to his demons and said, “Come on.”
They crept into the street, moving carefully and quietly, using the faint light of the moon to guide them to a smaller building in the middle of the overgrown field, fifty feet away from the Ancient Circle’s vast entrance and just big enough to fit them all.
William led them through a back entrance, settled them down, and found a front doorway to perch in. Other than the two soldiers he’d spotted earlier, he didn’t see any others outside the Ancient Circle. From his new position, he saw several stringy-haired women skinning a mangled carcass near the entrance, tossing aside what they couldn’t use, carrying the rest inside and toward the nearest fire. Others turned corpses over spits. It took William a moment to realize what they were cooking. Demons. William’s heart pounded with fear as he watched the people stuffing chunks of meat past their lips, chanting around mouthfuls of food.
They’re eating demons.
They’re eating us.
Close to some of the bonfires, piles of his demon brothers were waiting to be cooked.
The people grew excited as they chanted louder, “We are the children of a new god! The demons’ flesh will sustain us!”
William subconsciously brushed the lump on his knee, which had grown larger as the spore took root inside him. He suddenly felt open and vulnerable. These people weren’t the Ancients. They were something far worse. He clutched the sword he’d taken from the large man he’d killed several days ago, wishing he had more weapons, or more demons.
He’d been hoping to collect more of his brethren, but most of the demons in the Ancient City had been wounded, slaughtered, or driven off by the violent army. The demons were afraid. Who could blame them? Humanity was a vile, vicious race, capable of killing each other as well as anything else they encountered. He’d seen what humanity was capable of back in Brighton.
He gritted his teeth as his fear turned to anger. He wished these people dead.
If he were powerful enough, he’d do it himself.
He watched as the dirty-faced men and women covered their chests and faces in fresh demon blood, smearing it over their cheeks
and foreheads.
William snuck back outside, his anger roiling. The sight of those people eating demons filled him with a sick, dark feeling he couldn’t explain, and he and his brothers needed to get away. Retreating from the doorway, he led them out the back door of the building, quieting them as they crossed the small field and away from the Ancient Circle, headed back to the street. Every so often, William scraped against a chunk of ancient stone that was all but invisible in the dark. The moon was barely bright enough to see where he was going.
They’d made it back to the street and gone the length of several buildings when a large group of men carrying torches came around a corner.
One of them called out, “Who’s there?”
William froze.
His demons hissed.
The bobbing lights flickered as the group of men stepped cautiously closer, peering into the darkness. William saw bloodstained faces behind the torch’s glow. There were more than enough soldiers to kill him and his brother demons, and they were going to figure that out in a few more blinks of an eye.
“Let’s go!” William cried.
He allowed his demons to take the lead, as he’d learned to do. The demons knew passages in buildings that escaped most men. They bolted down a side street, leaving the men indecisive and stuck in place for a few moments.
Much too soon, footsteps pounded the road as the men gave chase.
Men cried out for their comrades to join the hunt.
Voices carried the message to unseen others in the dark streets, and the message found its way back to the dome. The army awakened with a roar.
“Demons! More food!”
Looking over his shoulder, William saw a growing collection of torches. The flames sputtered as the men carrying them ran faster, echoing their turns. William and his demons fled through the night, the breeze carrying the demon’s now-familiar scent into William’s nostrils.
The demons tore down several cracked roads, running past buildings and ducking beneath collapsing bridges that William could hardly see. He crouched when he needed to, climbed when he had to climb. Finally, they approached a large, shadowed building several stories tall. William had almost reached it, and the shouts seemed impossibly close. He glanced behind.
He never saw the chunk of ancient stone in the road until he tripped.
Suddenly he was flat on his stomach and bleeding, his sword clattering across the stone. He gasped for breath, frantically reaching for his weapon. Several of the demons stopped, waiting for him. They screeched at the oncoming torches, holding their arms up in anticipation of battle. William got to his feet and collected his blade.
But he was too late.
The first of the men collided with the demons. The shrieks pierced the air. William hoisted his sword to fight, but his demons knocked him backward, protecting him.
He heard the shouts of men swinging blades, the cries of his demons as the blades bit into their flesh.
“No!” William screamed. “Leave them alone!”
Blood-printed men wailed and fell as the demons tore into them, but there were so many men, and more were coming.
Men hacked and sliced. Demons felt the pain of sharp steel and shrieked.
Half of William’s brothers fell to the ground, dead. Others writhed in agony as their limbs were hacked off.
William lunged at a soldier with a fat, bloody face and a stubbly beard, but the man backed away. William wanted to kill, but it seemed all he could do was scream and futilely swing his sword.
He looked around him in the torchlight, wild-eyed. The few demons that were still alive watched him with dying eyes, inflicted with fatal wounds. The blood-printed men held their torches, surveying William. He looked from one dirty man to another, wishing he could stab them all.
“You killed them!” he screamed. “You killed my family!”
William’s anger grew as he swung his sword harder, faster, but the men backed away so he hit nothing but air.
“I’ll kill you!” William screamed. “I’ll kill you!”
The men’s faces changed as they watched him. A few laughed.
“Are you a demon, boy?” someone taunted.
“He was walking with the demons!” one man remarked.
“But they weren’t hurting him!” said another.
“Who the hell is he?”
“He’s a prophet!”
“Either that, or the devil!”
“What should we do with him?”
“Bring him to our god! Let him decide!”
The blood printed people surrounded him. Before William could react, strong hands grabbed him from behind. Someone ripped his sword away.
“No!” William screamed. “I’ll kill you! I’ll kill all of you! Let me go!”
He continued fighting as he was carried into the night, listening to the baleful shrieks of his remaining demons as the men speared them, finishing them off.
Chapter 2: Oliver
Melora stood up with a familiar expression on her face as she looked down at Jingo, Ivory, and Beck. She was going to challenge them again with her opinion, an opinion she’d developed in the days that had passed since they’d first seen the strange woman walking through the burned gap in the timber stockade. “I think she’s a ghost.”
Oliver was glad he wasn’t sitting on one of the chairs around the stone fireplace with the rest of them. He was starting to dislike Melora. Her penchant for letting her emotions run away with her words irritated him.
At the moment, Oliver was looking through one of the thin arrow slits—gun ports, as Jingo called them—through the thick timber walls on the first floor. Outside, he saw the silvery glow of a full moon shining on the bodies of dead settlers and demons, so thick on the ground that it was difficult to step around them in places.
The people of the settlement had lived at the bottom of the bowl shaped valley at the edge of the ocean behind a wall built from timbers, whole tree trunks that had been stood side by side. Outside the wall, in the valley stripped bare of trees, countless demon bodies littered the ground, mostly old corpses, little more than skeletons.
The dead inside the stockade were fresher, probably a week old by Oliver’s guess. They’d come through gaps burned through the wooden wall.
Once inside, the people had tried to fight from tower-shaped houses they lived in, small forts really. The square ground floor of each had walls of thick logs that no monster had a chance of breaking through. The successive floors above got smaller and were built with thinner and thinner logs. The sixth floor of each structure was a covered observation deck that provided a view of the whole valley all the way down to the shore, where wrecked steel ships lay washed up on the beach of the bay.
Somewhere in the strange little town at the edge of the sea was the woman with the gun they’d all seen on that first day when they’d discovered the settlement, and she wasn’t likely to walk in front of the tower where Oliver and the others were staying. Oliver knew she was hiding. The others, except for Melora, knew it, too.
“Ghosts aren’t real,” Ivory told Melora, from where he sat with the others.
“Ghosts are imaginary,” added Jingo, contributing the weight of centuries of learning to Ivory’s argument.
Oliver didn’t look back at the brief exchange. The silence that followed Ivory’s disagreement with Melora surely earned both Ivory and Jingo a dirty look.
Melora had her beliefs.
Jingo had his knowledge.
The two frequently didn’t agree, and Melora, probably because of her growing attachment for Ivory, saw Jingo as a kind of competition for his attention.
Maybe they were all just weary from too many days’ travel.
“She might’ve moved on and went back into the forest to be with her people,” Beck
said.
“These are her people,” said Ivory, apparently rebelling against Melora. “She was dressed the same strange way they are.”
“Because she was a ghost,” Melora told them all before turning to walk away. There was nowhere to go in the expansive room that made up the base of the tower, so she started up the stairs to the upper levels. Just as well, Oliver thought. It would be Ivory’s watch soon anyway, and he and Melora often stood their watches together.
Once Melora had disappeared, Beck asked in a hushed voice, “Jingo, how do you know there are no ghosts?”
Jingo laughed. “People have always believed in ghosts, and though the people of my time tried, no one was ever able to prove they existed.”
“I know people who have seen them,” said Beck. “They told me themselves. That’s proof.”
“No,” Jingo argued. “Perhaps tomorrow we can talk about all the devices we had in Ancient times for capturing proof: cameras, and televisions, infrared sensors, motion detectors.” Jingo sighed. “But not tonight. I’m tired.”
Oliver knew that Jingo didn’t want to open the discussion because Melora might return. Oliver had heard her arguing with him about whether the Ancients really could fly, whether they had carts that pushed themselves down the roads at blinding speeds, roads as smooth as the floor in the wealthiest house, and roads that went on for a million miles all over the world. She didn’t accept that any device had ever existed that could fit in a person’s hand, letting them talk to any other person on the whole flat earth as if they were right next to one another. She couldn’t believe the Ancients had great, terrible weapons that unleashed a piece of the sun and incinerated everything as far as the eye could see. No amount of arguing could convince her that the world was round and not flat. And no matter what piece of ancient Tech Magic came up for discussion, the conversation always came to a place beyond Melora’s willingness to believe.
