“Sevrik, you traitor!” shouted Didi. “What is this!”
“I’m no traitor,” said Sevrik. “I can’t let you do what you were about to do. There’s too much at stake.”
“You have no idea what’s at stake!” said Didi.
“I’m putting you under arrest,” said Sevrik.
“Under what charges?”
“I’m arresting you for tampering with the genes of the unborn, Didi.”
The blood pounded in Didi’s head and his eyesight collapsed into tunnel vision. In a haze of panic he heard a Guardian nearby hissing, “We trusted the DoS to keep us clean.”
Sevrik moved as if help Didi retain his balance, then whispered, “I couldn’t let you push that button, Didi. I have my reasons. I need more time to-”
“You fool!” said Didi. “If they knew about Project, don’t you think they knew about the Killswitch, too?”
“Shut up,” said Sevrik. Many of the Rangers looked at one another.
“You think you’ve bought time to look for Project. How much do you trust your men, Sevrik? They heard you say the pass-phrase to get in!”
Sevrik stood silent.
“If you don’t want anyone hitting the Killswitch,” said Didi, “then you’re going to have to set up camp right beside it! When will you sleep, what will you eat, who will you trust?”
Sevrik gritted his teeth, said, “Take him away.”
As the Guardians pulled at him, Didi said, “You’ve damned yourself to rot in here, you traitor! I hope you trust the demon not to steal Project’s genes while he’s too immature to protect them himself!”
Didi looked back as they dragged him away. Sevrik stared at the Killswitch. “You don’t understand!” shouted Didi. “We have to kill him! You don’t understand what the demon is, not like I do! You don’t know what will happen if they suck him into themselves!”
Sevrik leaned over, slowly, and picked up a small chair. He heard Didi shouting from the hallway. A few Guardians remained nearby, straight and alert.
Sevrik dragged the chair across the floor to the Killswitch.
“We’ve damned creation!” shouted Didi, from far away. “Genetic apocalypse! The devil turned deity! Genetic... apocalypse!”
Sevrik adjusted the chair, then sat down. In darkness he waited.
Chapter Fourteen
The Wasteland
He awoke. His body was sore, his senses chained to a world of pain. The sun was full and white and burning directly overhead. He heard the low hum of voices all around. He clenched his fingers, felt hot sand, and he knew that he was alive.
A shadow covered his face. His vision was blurred, but he could see the face of a young man directly overhead, wide and with dark hair.
“Marlon!” he said, rising quickly.
The young man moved away, crouching in the sand. The blur sharpened into someone unfamiliar. They stared at one another. He looked around and saw dozens of people crouching all around him on a wide desert plain under the blue dome of the sky. The people were unkempt, the grime on their faces mixed with cracked, yellow tribal skin paint. Some cried softly, others wailed and beat their fists in the dirt, some stared back at him with empty faces, but most of the people simply sat and waited to see what the fates would decide for them.
He lifted up on his knees and looked further out. He saw men with scars and black tattoos wearing heavy boots, leather jackets, and motley armor. They were armed with rifles and handguns. He saw them leading other groups of ragged people to sit with the main group, using whips and heavy sticks when their captives did not move quickly enough. Some slavers rode on the backs of lean horses and shouted orders to their scarred enforcers.
They heard gunshots in the distances, layer upon layer, and the primitives clung to the ground. An old man began praying, “Omne Padre, oh, oh, Omne Padre. We stand before the valley, we must not fear. He leads me to green pastures, he lets me drink untainted water. Oh, Omne Padre…”
As the old man continued, the dark-haired young man sighed loudly and covered his ears. Finally the slaves lifted their heads and resumed their hushed conversations, their eyes always on their captors. The old man turned to him and said, “Just who are you?”
“I am…” he said, then cleared his throat painfully. He knew that he looked different from the others, the enslaved primitives. “I come from a place far from here. It’s difficult to explain. Listen, there was someone else with me. A young man, very strong. He was hurt. His name is Marlon. Have you seen him?”
The old man stared at him for a long time, then shook his head. Now others were watching him, trying to place his strange accent, staring at his strange pants and shoes and pale skin. “Are you a demon?” the old man said suddenly.
At that moment more slavers on horseback led another group of primitives to sit with them. One scarred slaver led his horse near the new slaves, then kicked a girl from behind, knocking her into the others. The slavers laughed, their voices guttural and inhuman, then left to continue their work. The slaves remained quiet for a while, then the old man repeated, “Are you a demon?”
“Of course not!” he replied. “I come from far away, that’s why I look different. But please, listen, are you sure you haven’t seen my friend? He’s–”
“No one else like you is here,” said the old man. He glanced at the dark-haired young man, who also shook his head. Finally satisfied, the old man said, “My name’s Agmar. I’m a slave – just like you.” He let that sink in, then said, “I’ve lived in the villages of the so-called primitives for most of my life. Deep in the hills… away from raiders and other scum from the cities. Now it seems they’ve found us. Only Omne Padre knows what will happen to us.”
“Tend the sheep!” cried a raider, his voice harsh and rasping.
“Mi-i-i-i-i-inding the sheep!” came the answer. In the distance they saw two armed slavers laugh and pass a bottle between them.
“They’re called the Ugly,” said Agmar. “They come from Pontius, west of here. They’re a gang of human garbage. They make deals with demons when they have to. They specialize in the flesh trade.”
“Slavers?” he said.
“Slavers,” said Agmar. He pushed a bony hand from his robe. They shook hands.
They heard more gunshots far away, then screams followed by laughter.
Frustration welled up in the boy and he said, “I fought demons… just to end up here.”
“Fought demons?” said Agmar, laughing without humor. “These monsters are worse, believe me. But tell me… what’s your name?”
The boy opened his mouth, then stopped. He almost gave his nickname, the name he’d gone by since birth, but something seemed wrong about doing that. That old life was over.
“Wodan,” he said. “My name is Wodan.”
* * *
All day long the Ugly brought more captives down from the hills. One hundred slaves, two hundred, three hundred… then they could not be easily counted. That night the raiders drove them into a circle, waving torches and cursing, while others aimed at them with rifles, ready to kill at a moment’s notice. Wodan, Agmar, and the black-haired young man stayed near one another. Eventually the slaves were ringed by raiders on horseback, then made to face north. Wodan could see the faces of the raiders in the torchlight; they were hideous, mutilated, noses missing and ears shredded, like inhuman masks. In the shivering red torchlight they appeared demonic.
More raiders approached on horseback. They wore black furred cloaks to guard against the cold night, and the torchlight glittered on the rings on their fingers, ears, noses, lips, eyebrows. Wodan recognized two of them immediately: A tall man with a blond beard and dyed checkerboard facial scarring, and a short man with dark hair and runic scarring. He felt dread, for they were the men he’d seen on the mountainside, the men he’d gone to for help.
One man rode ahead of the others, then stopped before the gathered slaves. He rode a tall vanilla horse with dead ruby eyes. The man’s long black cape nearl
y trailed in the dust behind him. Wild red hair and a red beard framed a black sun tattoo that was carved in the middle of his pale face. His dark silk shirt hung open and showed, among a nest of scars, a large rat’s skull stitched into his chest. Two large handguns hung low on his hips. He radiated power and authority. Most unnerving of all was his smile, immobile and unnatural, which revealed yellow teeth peeking through his thick mustache. As he looked over the slaves, two raiders on foot moved to stand on either side of him, illuminating him with their flaming staves.
He cleared his throat and, still smiling, said loudly, “My name is Barkus, leader of the Right Arm of the Ugly. I would like to speak truth to you, as none ever will, never in all your life. I hope that you will listen to me.”
The smile never left his face. The slaves looked to one another, then averted their eyes.
“You are now a slave and, until we reach civilization, I am your master. But since I, too, am a slave, I feel it is my special duty to explain to you the rules of this game. I do this because I want you to be winners, not losers. I want you to overcome what seems to be a cruel fate and succeed at life.”
Wodan studied the faces around him. He studied the scarred faces of the Ugly in the torchlight.
Barkus continued. “To start, let me tell you of the nature of your new life as a slave. When we reach civilization, I will sell you to your new masters. You will work for them, and the work will be difficult at first. In exchange, your masters will clothe you, feed you, and give you a place to sleep at night. Your masters have further duties in your care, which I will explain later. I will not tell you where we are going, and I cannot tell you where you will end up, but do not worry: In most cities, it is illegal for a master to kill his slave. As long as you obey your master, and do your work well, your life will not be bad. This is not to say that life will be easy. If you disobey your master, you can be punished. But, as tribals living outside of civilization, I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that life is never easy.
“I am not speaking down to you. I know you are afraid; you see all these armed men I have at my disposal and, of course, you expect the worst. I am their master, just as I am your master, but what I say to you now comes from my long experience of living as a slave. My mastery and my power come from understanding my own enslavement. Let me explain. When I was twelve, and my brothers were eleven and fourteen, we ambushed our father while he was taking a bath and we killed him. On the one hand, we wanted to be free from his rule; on the other hand, we wanted his power and we wanted the loyalty of the organization that he led. This was very foolish. My younger brother and I got scared, and we denied that we were murderers. Our lives were spared. My older brother proudly admitted his guilt, but when he demanded power, he was killed.
“Do you see? My brothers and I did not bother to understand the nature of power and duty - how it works, how things balance out, how one moves and how one thinks at certain times - and because we did not understand, we acted foolishly, violently, and we were very nearly crushed by a game that we did not understand.
“So, here are things as I understand them. I am a slave. Someone more powerful than me tells me to come here, go there, do this, do that. And because I am a good slave, because I do not react violently towards those more powerful than me, I am rewarded. I am given food, a home, horses, guns, drink and tobacco, other slaves that I can be master of, women that I can do whatever I want with, even time to myself that I can use to think and enjoy various pursuits... and the same applies to all of you. If I lashed out at my master, I would become a hunted creature, a criminal with no friends to trust, nothing to eat, nowhere to sleep - no longer a human being, but an object marked for death.
“This is life. And it is not just so in the civilized world; every animal in the world has another animal that it fears, and another animal that it commands and can destroy. Only the demon sits at the top of the pyramid, and destroys but cannot be destroyed. But since he is a god, he is above criticism.
“But I know what you’re thinking. You think that I am trying to fool you into giving up, that I’m trying to sugarcoat the fact that you have been enslaved. Well, let me now speak to you of your former situation, the “freedom” that I have taken you from, and we shall see who is trying to fool who.
“How you miss your home! Waking to the sound of birds singing, cooking bread with the grain you picked yourself, singing the songs of your forefathers, making love to that special cousin, praying to the spirits of your ancestors... and sacrificing a few unlucky members to the demon, if he should find you out.
“Do you think I don’t know about your rituals? I’ve seen how you sacrifice the strongest men, the most beautiful women, the most intelligent souls. I’ve seen how you spy on one another, how you gossip and pick who will live and who will die. And then your leaders crawl to the gods in their caves, they grovel on their bellies and beg and plead. And then a few disappear, while the majority is spared. You call that freedom?
“I know you tell stories to your children about the ‘bad men’ who live behind city walls. I know you fear civilization. You cover your children to protect them from my men, but you can’t protect them from winter, from disease, from the spears of rival tribes, can you? Demons come to you and take your children by force or by negotiation… and you don’t have the tools to produce the guns you’d need to repel them, do you?
“Freedom has its price, doesn’t it? You pay for it and you pay for it, but you never really get what you wanted, do you? All you’ve done is run away from reality. By refusing to be responsible adults and work within civilized society, you’ve truly chosen to be slaves to the forces of nature.
“In the years to come, if you’re smart and play by the rules, you’ll see the true irony of your situation. You see, now that you are “slaves” in the common sense of the word, you will enjoy more freedom from worry than you ever knew in your former life. Your master will be the true puppet, spending his time worrying about your comfort, your needs, and all you have to do is obey his word. And, if you like, you can gain authority, responsibility, freedom and slaves of your own. Then you will have earned the right to worry, and worry as much as you want, about finances and other pedestrian nonsense.
“Also, there is the demon to consider. How you people can live among predators and pander to their needs is beyond me. The demon does not come into civilization. As long as we stick together, and show that we have guns - but do not use them - then, nine times out of ten, the demon leaves us alone. Can you say the same? Or do you have to teach your children how to hide when they hear the beating of wings, the sound of movement in the dark, whispered promises from dark caves spoken by inhuman mouths? Do you have to teach your children to wear a social mask of simplicity, imbecility, and ugliness, so that others will not notice them and suggest their name when it comes time to sacrifice?
“That is not our way. Powerful men live behind strong city walls, and they have armed men at their side, and they do not travel in small, vulnerable groups. Your master will protect you from the flesh demons, as well as from starvation, frostbite, sunburn, disease, and so on. Your master will care for you as he would any of his personal belongings. You cannot say the same of Mother Nature! Indeed, you should make the interests of your master your own, for without his protection, what are you?
“You are what you have been until now: A plaything that lives at the whims of an uncaring universe. You cannot fight the entire world, my friends. You cannot fight the world.
“My younger brother and I were smarter than that, and I thank my mother for giving us counsel similar to that which I give you. My brother and I kept silent. We kept our heads down and did what powerful men wanted us to do. We worked, and worked hard. A simple accountant took over the leadership of my father’s organization. A man with no vision, a calculating, cold, reserved schemer. We sat on his knee and learned how the system works, and because of that, we are alive today. No, not just alive - because we learned, and did not rebel, becau
se we worked within the system and did not dig our own graves, we became masters of slaves. My younger brother, Boris, who is called the Living Scar, became leader of the head of the Ugly... and as for me, I became leader of the Right Arm of the Ugly, and have more guns at my beck and call than any man can ever destroy.”
Barkus finished his speech. His smile never wavered. A wind picked up, and his long cloak flew around him. He nudged his horse, turned, and rode. The other riders kicked their horses and followed him into the darkness far away, echoing like dying thunder. The slaves looked about lamely, their jaws slack. The Ugly that ringed them smoked and seemed lost in thought. The slaves remained silent, fearful of the mood of their captors. When the ring of Ugly finally moved about and spoke to one another, the slaves did the same. Wodan listened while Agmar spoke with another.
“The thing is,” said Agmar, “what he said is essentially true. Clever for him to say, you know? I hate to admit it, but that seems to be the reality of the situation.”
[Demonworld #1] Demonworld Page 22
