Scavenger of Souls

by Joshua David Bellin

  I wondered if she was dreaming. Remembering the time before. I wondered if that was the problem.

  Eventually, though, she had to wake up, and that gave Aleka her signal to get us moving again. Gauging the sun, I estimated we had enough daylight to cover three or four miles, what with the rough terrain and the twin burdens of the old woman and the little kids. Adem helped Soon with the stretcher, while the rest of us took turns giving the little ones piggybacks. There weren’t enough big people to go around, so one of the kids always ended up lurching along beside me, immune to my attempts at chatter or jokes, holding a hand that dragged him more than it held him up. Zataias skipped his turn more than most. I suspected he was in on Aleka’s secret too. That would be just like him, young enough to play the grown-ups’ game even though he was old enough to guess its true purpose was to deceive.

  We descended the slight rise where we’d set up our temporary camp and entered a flat, broad valley of stone. I’d have said the terrain looked no different from the land I remembered the past seven months, but that wouldn’t have been fair to the past seven months. In fact, this area looked a lot worse. I’d grown accustomed to dust, a choking brown dust that coated every surface and rose in swirling storms when the wind blew. Out here the dust had been swept away along with everything else, exposing reddish rock that rippled like an endless series of motionless waves. If there’d ever been a human civilization in the vicinity, roads and houses and farms, it had all been leveled as completely as if a giant hand had wiped the place clean. I kept alert for possible food sources—flowering trees, river stones that could be flipped for squirming multi-legged creatures—but there truly was nothing, just an endless table of rock like an enormous tombstone.

  The river struggled along by our side, cutting a slim channel through the unvarying stone. It had shrunk to a muddy trickle, and I found it hard to believe it could ever pick up steam the way Aleka had promised. Still, we hugged its eastern shore, determined not to lose this frail lifeline. We’d never been able to stay so close to water for so long—the Skaldi had always found us by the rivers, so we’d shied from the water’s edge, making furtive trips to fill our canteens then veering off into the desert again. Being near water made me feel as if I was doing something wrong, something risky and disobedient. It wasn’t only that I was afraid something might have survived the destruction of the Skaldi nest. It was that I didn’t trust the river to last. The more we relied on it, the more we’d be lost if it ever ran dry.

  It didn’t, though. By late evening it had shriveled to the point where you could barely dunk your hands to the wrist, but it kept going.

  We swallowed another spoonful of slop from our nearly empty cans and slept by the river’s side, and when I woke, I realized what none of us had been able to tell during the dusk: the color of the stone around us had changed from rusty red to pitch black, smooth and glossy and bright in the gleam of the new day. It might have been the remains of a road if not for the fact that it was simply immense, extending as far as I could see to the east and northwest. And there was something else: stone shapes were visible all around us, not just the usual ripples or rises in the ground but distinct forms dotting the land like black sculptures. Some of them were roughly the size of the stunted trees that grew in the desert, others no taller than a human being. They were blunt, misshapen, glazed blobs of rock without distinguishing features. But all of them gave me the eerie feeling that they’d once been alive, as if a thick, glassy layer of stone had flowed over and trapped whatever lay inside.

  Nessa tried another of her songs, but she fell silent when the stone bounced back her voice in a hollow, mocking echo. “Maybe this is the mountains?” she suggested.

  “Does this look like mountains?” Wali said.

  “I was just asking.”

  “Try using your brain instead,” he muttered.

  Nessa turned on him, eyes hot, but Aleka stepped between them.

  “This isn’t the mountains,” she said. “But it’s a good sign.”

  I looked around at the endless desert of black stone. How it could be a good sign of anything I couldn’t figure.

  Aleka turned to the rest of us and gestured toward the northwest, where the expanse of black rock vanished into a gleaming haze of distance. “We’re close to our destination,” she said. “We came out of the desert farther east than I wanted us to be, but not so far that we can’t cut across this region in a day or less. We’ll need to take precautions, though. The stone gets very hot, especially at high noon.”

  “What’s on the other side?” Wali said.

  “Shelter,” she replied. “Clean water. Possibly—”

  “Food?” Soon interrupted.

  She didn’t answer. I glanced at the little ones, the pitiful thinness of their shoulders and cheeks, the eagerness glowing through the dusty veil that had descended over their eyes. I realized it wasn’t only Zataias who suspected that this journey was anything but business as usual.

  I think Aleka realized it too. “We’ll have to wait and see,” she said softly. “But we’re in a much better position now. Let’s break camp quickly and prepare to cover as much ground as possible before midday.”

  Everyone moved with new purpose. In minutes we were packed and ready to go. I rounded up the kids and made sure the littlest ones had the lightest burdens. Aleka insisted on wrapping extra cloth bandages around people’s boots, tying extra head scarves to cover faces and necks. We spent precious minutes erecting a canopy over the old woman, who snoozed on. We filled our canteens with muddy water, and I saw people lick their lips at the thought of what we might find ahead.

  Then we were on the move.

  I turned to say a word to Aleka, but found her already at my side. She dropped her voice and spoke low enough that Keely and Zataias wouldn’t overhear, but still her words gained a weird, tinny reverberation from the polished stone.

  “Stay alert,” she said. “We’re not in the clear yet.”

  “What are you afraid of?” I whispered back.

  She sized me up, as if gauging how much to say.

  “You wanted answers, Querry,” she said at last. “I hope you’re prepared to get them.”

  2

  We tramped across the plateau in double file, weaving our way through monuments of stone.

  Aleka must have cautioned the other adults and teens as well, because Soon discreetly withdrew his gun and Wali his knife. Nessa stayed by the old woman’s stretcher, but she didn’t sing, and her eyes darted from side to side, all sleepiness gone from them. Even Zataias looked edgy, though maybe that was only from the excitement of playing an adult game.

  Aleka’s promise—or was it a warning?—rang in my ears like an echo off the glassy stone. There were so many things I wanted to know, so many things only she could tell me. About my past. My family. My father. Myself. I knew how a starving man felt when he saw an oasis in the desert. The only difference was, I felt like I’d been starving for seven months, and it was finally coming to an end.

  All we had to do was cross the plateau of stone.

  We hadn’t gone more than a mile before I realized how hard that was going to be. The sun had barely cleared the horizon, and already it hammered down on us, making the air writhe with heat, the black rock sizzle like a brand. Not only that, but the stone that had seemed so smooth at first glance turned out to be sharp and broken, stabbing into the soles of my shoes with each step—though that wasn’t surprising, considering my boots had been worn down not only by me but by whoever had lived and marched and died in them fifty years ago. Though the kids had started off with a burst of energy, it soon took all my coaxing and hand-holding to keep them on the move. I began to imagine that a giant fist had smashed down on the surface of the plain, shattering everything into shards and splinters of stone that sparkled like a trillion fragments of glass. Waves of heat radiated from the surface, weird ripples that made everything in the dead zone sway as if it was alive. The effects of light and sound produced
by this wasteland made the journey as disorienting as it was exhausting: every time I saw one of the stone shapes rising in the distance, I caught my breath, thinking I was seeing an actual, living human being—or worse, one of the monsters that hid in human form. I wouldn’t have been completely surprised if these figures had sprung to life and chased us across the plain, like shadows freed from the coal-black ground.

  I touched one of the monoliths as I passed it. I’m not sure if I was testing to see if it was alive or simply checking to make sure it was really there. It burned my fingers as if I’d thrust my hand directly into a fire.

  The farther we traveled across the deadly plateau, the more I began to wonder what had created this place, whether it was the result of some natural disaster or a leftover from the wars that had swept away the old civilization. Laman used to talk about the bombs that had been dropped in those days, bombs that could not only level buildings but vaporize entire cities, mimicking the power of the sun for a split second of total destruction. He’d told me that was why there were so few traces left of the old times, why everything was desert, why we so rarely stumbled across the remains of a highway or skyscraper or playground. That also explained why the sky stayed filthy and brown even after all this time, because everything that had been incinerated down here had entered the atmosphere as a permanent, oppressive cloud. What that meant was that every time you breathed, you breathed residue from the world before: houses, shopping malls, people. That used to give me a sick feeling, until I considered the alternative, which was not breathing at all.

  But in all his stories, Laman had never told me about bombs that could turn the landscape to volcanic glass. He’d never mentioned a power that could make everything melt and then re-form into the polished, mocking shapes that surrounded me. I supposed this might have been the site of an actual volcanic eruption, the ground heaving upward and spewing out superheated rock that had cooled into these twisted, lopsided remains. If that was the case, though, I couldn’t figure out what had happened to the volcano, unless one of the larger rock formations was its extinct cone. Aleka, as usual, said nothing, and no one asked her for an explanation. What could have had this effect on the landscape, short of some prehistoric monster that had scoured the land with molten fire, was beyond me.

  As noon approached, a more pressing problem presented itself: water. I had carefully weighed the canteen in my hand when we set out, and I could tell that we’d drunk far more than usual as we inched across the scorching plain. The kids especially we kept dousing with water, hoping to keep their small bodies from drying up in the blaze. But we’d also discovered that the river had become completely undrinkable in its narrow channel through the rock, its depth little more than a few inches and its color the black of ash. Aleka might say that the watercourse grew again once it reached the canyon, but at the moment, pure water seemed as far off as that oasis in the desert. And like the spectral rock forms that crowded us on all sides, I was beginning to wonder whether the oasis might turn out to be a mirage.

  We rested from noon until the sun neared the western horizon. Our shadows spooled out behind us like gigantic threads, but when I looked back, there was no sign of anything they might have connected us to. I could tell from Aleka’s rigid posture that she hated to waste so much time, but we didn’t have any choice. The kids were practically comatose from the heat, and the rest of us were sunburned, famished, and exhausted from carrying them and the old woman. As it was, we were barely able to find relief from the sun’s assault. A shallow declivity was the best we could do, with blankets stretched across the rock to shelter us. Wali, I noticed, draped his own blanket over Nessa’s shoulders, his peace offering I guess. She accepted with a nod and a weary smile. As I sank into a half sleep, I wondered if Aleka planned to march us through the night.

  She did. As soon as the sun hit the horizon we were up, and with nothing to trap the heat, the relative cool of dusk—a few degrees cooler than day—hurried in. It was a moonless night, only a single bright star pulsing through the murk that covered our world. Without flashlights or flamethrowers to light a path, I was afraid we’d veer off course. But Aleka was determined not to stop now that her goal was within reach. And so, while the kids slept in our arms and the old woman in her hammock, we followed our leader into the endless black land.

  She’d never let us down before, I kept reminding myself as we stumbled through the dark. And once we arrived, she’d not only give us what our bodies needed, but give me what my heart so desperately wanted.

  As the sky brightened, I saw that we’d entered a part of the landscape where large slabs of the black rock lay jumbled and heaped on each other, looking almost like buildings that had collapsed or been bombed to the ground. Wali and Soon clutched their weapons more tightly now that we’d come to a place that provided cover for enemies. I gripped Keely’s hand, feeling the tiniest bit of relief when he returned my squeeze like he used to. Aleka tested one of the stacks of stone, and when it turned out not to be as precarious as it looked, she led us to its summit to survey the landscape.

  Nessa’s hands fumbled with her scarf as she retied her dirty-blond ponytail. “This isn’t the mountains.”

  “No,” Aleka said. “There are no mountains here.”

  No one showed the least surprise at her announcement that we’d been chasing something that didn’t exist.

  “What is this place?” I asked.

  Aleka stared into the distance for an eternity before answering.

  “A place from long ago,” she said at last. “We need to be careful.”

  “Did it look like this before?”

  She glanced at me, and I was sure she was hiding something. Then she pointed and said, “We’ve reached the canyon. There!”

  Everyone followed her finger as if an electric bolt had shot from it. In the distance, southwest of the wilderness of stone, the black desert came abruptly to an end and the color of the land changed back to its typical drab brown. But I could see, just beyond the edge of the blackness, a dark line zigzagging through the land. It looked as slender as something drawn by a pencil, but it must have been enormous to be visible at all from where we stood. The trickling river angled straight for it, as if it was as eager as we were to get out of this dead land. It might only have been a trick of weariness and distance, but I could have sworn the light that hung over that line was softer than the angry red light of morning, a pale blue light like an exhalation of clean air and water from the canyon’s mouth.

  No sooner did Wali see it than he charged down the stone mound. He was followed a second later by Soon, each of them clutching a kid to their chest and leaping down the rock before pounding across the black land. Adem and Nessa were left beside the old woman’s stretcher, while the rest of the kids squirmed out of their caretakers’ arms and charged after their companions, pointing at the canyon and shouting words that alternated between taunts and encouragement.

  “I see it!”

  “Me too!”

  “Beat you there!”

  “In your dreams!”

  “Hurry up!”

  “Wait for me!”

  “I need a piggyback!”

  “Querry . . .”

  “Keep order,” Aleka shouted over the din of their voices as she raced down the hill after her colony. “Querry, watch the children. Tyris, Nekane, guard our rear. Adem . . .”

  The rest of her words were drowned out by a chorus like nothing that came from human throats: a long, ululating shriek that emanated from the piles of black rock. Up ahead, I saw Soon raise his gun then fall, the child he held rolling free as his big body hit the ground and lay still.

  Aleka whirled, her own gun leveled. The next instant, the heaps of stone seemed to come alive as human figures appeared out of crevices and grabbed Nekane, Tyris, and Adem. Other dark shapes materialized from the ground, intercepting the children and hoisting them into the air, their legs kicking vainly. Wali bounded toward the captives, shouting, “Get your goddamned
hands off of them!” But the strangers blocked his path to the children, and he fell beneath their weight, surrendering the child he was holding—Beatrice—to their arms. I lost sight of Soon in all the bodies, but I heard Nessa scream before her voice was cut short as rough hands wrapped her mouth.

  For a moment I stood frozen. Our captors looked human, men with long dark hair, faces free of beards, and lean, muscular frames stripped naked except for brown loincloths. Looking human meant nothing, though. If these were Skaldi, in less time than it took to blink they’d shake off the bodies they’d counterfeited and consume the bodies they’d captured, moving from victim to victim while the skins of those they’d eaten fell in tatters to the ground.

  But they didn’t. They weren’t Skaldi. They were people like us.

  Aleka must have realized it too. Standing at the base of the stone mound, she flourished her gun, a silver pistol. Whether she could manage a clean shot with the prisoners held tightly I couldn’t tell.

  “Let them go,” she said in a commanding voice that rebounded across the black land. The men made no move to obey, but one of them raised his voice in a call like a scream of pain.