“Maybe they’re not so bad,” I said to myself as I walked to the modified warehouse we called home.
“Did he convince you?” asked a familiar voice, just as I reached the front door.
“Byrd?”
“Did he convince you that everything he’s doing is to make a better Jamestown? That’s the speech he gave me when I asked him.”
“Yeah, that’s what he told me.”
“I figured as much. Come with me.”
I followed him through the front doors and down the hall, until we found a dark and uninhabited classroom.
“Go turn the lights on,” Byrd told me. “I need to grab some stuff first.”
It took me a minute to find the switch, but as soon as I turned the lights on Byrd rushed in and dumped a pile of folders and documents onto the nearest table.
“I took as much as I could carry without getting caught. These are recorded donations to the Temple, messages they’ve sent, and all the dirty secrets they’ve been trying to hide… You ok, Scott? You look pale.”
My heart skipped several beats as I looked at the papers spread out across the tabletop. Before I delve into what happened next, I should clarify my state of mind. It was years before I came to terms with how I felt; scared, angry, but mostly just desperate. I was desperate to keep things from changing. Frollo looked out for me. I had plenty of food, a warm bed that was all my own and I didn’t have to worry about something happening to Tex. My life was good, and I didn’t want to lose that.
And that is why I threw the papers into the trashcan and tried to set them on fire.
“What the hell are you doing?” Byrd yelled, smacking the lighter out of my hands.
“I don’t… I don’t…. I…”
“I thought you were different, but you’re just another fucking shiner!”
While Byrd collected the papers, I stammered for almost a full minute. Like I said, it was years before I even realized exactly why I had done it.
“They owe us. You realize that, don’t you? I don’t know your story, Scott, but it probably wasn’t too different from mine. My family didn’t have shit, and every single day I got beaten and bullied by those ghetto shitheads back home. But Frollo and these others, they spent their whole lives in the lap of luxury. They had butlers, friends, plenty of food and probably hired poor kids from the Gray District to wipe their asses for them. We deserve to have everything they have and they deserve to have it taken from them. Don’t you understand that? The world owes us.”
Chapter 12 - Scott Vale
I decided to blow off steam in the shooting range, hoping it would distract me. I passed by the armory where racks of assault rifles, shotguns and other weapons were stored, but I opted to use the jet black pistol that I always kept at my hip. It was simple, durable, reliable and deadly.
A thirteen round clip became thirteen clean headshots on the small paper targets, and it did help to distract me from the incident with Byrd, if only for a second.
“Great shot.”
“Thanks,” I told Tex, as I reloaded my weapon. “I saw your latest course time. Nice work.”
“It was nothing.” He aimed a large caliber rifle down the range and hit his target square in the chest. “So, what’s been up with you?”
“Nothing.”
“Really? You seem upset,” he said, as he hit another target in the neck.
I debated whether or not I wanted to talk about my worries with him. On the one hand, he was my best friend and like a little brother to me. On the other, I was the one who brought him here in the first place. I was the one who wanted us to take that test so we could get out of the Gray District. Now we finally had hot meals and clean clothes… it seemed wrong to tell him our good fortune could be in jeopardy.
“I lost one of my textbooks and I’m afraid I’ll get in trouble.”
“Is that all? I’m sure you can get another one. If not, you can borrow mine.”
He aimed down the range once again, but this time found himself unable to pull the trigger.
“Looks like a hog got out of its cage.”
The Men of the Temple kept several animals, mostly pigs, chickens and a few rabbits, penned up in the back of the warehouse. The chef used them for meat, but they were also used for teaching survival skills like skinning and cooking in the wild, and occasionally for target practice, when Frollo wanted to put on a show for an especially rich donor.
“Should we try and take it back?”
“I’d rather not get raked by its tusks trying to wrestle that thing. We should just put it down and take it to the kitchen.”
He aimed again, but I could see the gun start to shake in his hands.
“You ok, Tex?”
Bang
The hog screamed like a banshee as the bullet tore through its haunches. Without thinking, I drew my pistol and put two shots in its head.
We stood in silence, both in shock. I almost thought I could hear the rhythm of Tex’s heart, and mine was beating so hard I thought it would leap out of my chest.
“Are you ok?”
He nodded.
“It’s an animal. Everything is ok.”
He nodded again, his face completely white. “Let’s just get it out of here.”
Suddenly, I was glad I hadn’t told him.
Chapter 13 - Ross Keller
“...good racial hygiene makes for a cleaner, happier society.” I mouthed along with the words as they were spoken above me. I still wasn’t sure exactly what that old man had wanted me to hear, but he had sparked my curiosity about a different subject; the Truands.
I’d spent every moment of the last year gathering information on them and today was no different. I was huddled behind a row of garbage cans, watching them intently. I knew I was close to a breakthrough.
There was an alleyway across the street, and six Homo Sapiens had entered it in the last hour. Only one had come back out; an especially grimy looking vagrant who might have been drunk.
I once again used my camera to zoom in on the alley, hoping that the man about to pass by would be number seven. He wasn’t. In fact, this Sapien seemed just as naive about the alley’s contents as all the Omniscients around him, but I knew what was there.
It had taken me months, but I finally tracked down the entrance to their secret hideout. The government used to have records of this place, but they were long gone. They’d been destroyed years ago, right around the time the Truands stopped allowing anyone else inside.
“Looking for something?”
I shot up at the sound of his voice, knocking over two trash cans as I did.
“I was just trying to get a good view of that building. I was hired to take some photos...” I trailed off when I realized who I was speaking to.
“Do you really think I’m that stupid?”
“No, uh… I’m sorry.”
The old Sapien looked towards the alley and then back at me. “I recognize you. You’re that city archivist who hates candy. I think I failed to introduce myself last time we met.” He pulled his wide brimmed hat from atop his head, while extending his other hand to me. “My name is Fells Barrow. If there’s any information you want to get from the Truands, I can provide it.”
“I’ve heard of you. Every Truand I’ve talked to has spoken very highly of you.”
That was a serious understatement. All the Truands I had talked to had rambled on and on about Fells Barrow, aka The Grandfather. He was an incredibly important figure to his people, which was why it was so surprising that he turned out to be this dingy old man whom I had, only a year ago, seen selling candy bars like a common street peddler.
“I’m glad to see that you’ve heard of me. Now tell me why you’re spying on us.”
“I uh… I’m sorry. There are a lot of stories about the Truand’s secret underground base, but there aren’t any records of it. They were all…”
“Destroyed,” he finished for me. I hit the button to turn on my voice recorder as subtly as I p
ossibly could, just before he spoke again. “We didn’t like the idea of anyone being able to just waltz into our home.”
“Did the Truands really destroy the records, Fells Barrow?” I asked him.
I saw the suspicion in his eyes, but there were a lot of hoops I had to jump through before the recording could be added to the archives.
“Yes.”
“Can you tell me anything about the events that made the Truands hunt down and destroy the records of their underground base?”
His answer wasn’t what I expected. “Would you like to see it?”
“See what?”
“What do you think?”
This day was getting better by the moment. “Yes, of course!” I said, as I checked my camera, inserting fresh batteries and emptying the memory card.
“You can’t bring that.”
“What?”
“You heard me. You can’t bring the camera.”
“Oh come on!” I said, pleading with him. “Don’t you want people to know about your culture? Don’t you want them to be informed?”
He walked up to me, getting uncomfortably close.
“I trust you because you seem… passionate. I think you genuinely care about getting to the truth.” The rough edges and fatherly wisdom in his words faded in an instant, leaving only a voice that seemed to speak directly to my soul. “But sometimes secrets are better. Transparency would be the death of my people.”
“Ok, I understand,” I said, partially out of respect, but mostly out of fear.
“Put it on the ground.”
I did what he said without question. “Happy?”
“Smash it,” he said, making his request in a calm and flat tone.
“What? That’ll come out of my paycheck!” It only occurred to me after I made that statement that I was speaking to a man who sold candy bars on the street for a living.
I don’t know if it was out of monetary guilt, a deep seeded need to find out what was going on inside this hideout or perhaps it was my unspoken hatred for that shitty camera and its power switch that shocked me when I turned it on, but I did smash it. I crushed it under my right foot, then my left foot and stomped on it until it was nothing but scrap metal and sparking wires.
“Good work, boy,” he said, his voice returning to its rough state. “But there is one last thing keeping you out.”
“What else could you possibly want me to do?” I asked him, intensely frustrated.
He didn’t respond with words, but simply lifted my voice recorder from my shirt pocket and tossed it into the street.
He waved at me to follow, and I did, all the way across the street and into the alley. Along the way I tried to look for my recorder, but it was lost in the sea of people rushing home from work and kids running home after school. A few private trams rolled by as well; a method of transportation used only by the wealthiest people in the city. I hoped that my recorder hadn’t landed on the tracks and gotten crushed.
“Turn around,” Fells told me after taking me into the alley and around a corner, out into a large open space between two buildings.
“Why?” I demanded to know.
“It’s because we danks like our privacy.”
“Can’t you just level with me?”
When I asked him that honest question, his face seemed to soften, as did his voice, which changed to be more like the one he had used earlier.
“We like to keep the entrances hidden. It’s a safety precaution, and with the Men of the Temple coming after us…”
“Wait a second, there’s more than one entrance? Where?”
He looked at me condescendingly before giving his final order, “Boy, just turn around.”
I did as I was told and a second later found my eyes covered by a dingy piece of cloth.
“What are you doing?”
“Don’t speak again.”
He spun me around and started to rub my face with dirt. At least I hope it was dirt. He did the same to the rest of my clothes, put a worn out cap on my head and wrapped something around my shoulders. It turned out to be a jacket and as I pulled my arms into the sleeves I wondered where he had found it in this seemingly abandoned alleyway.
After scuffing my clean leather shoes and pulling a ragged baseball cap over my head he finally told me, “You’re ready. But don’t let anyone know that you’re a shiner.”
“Will they hurt me if they find out?”
“No, but they won’t be happy about it. Now walk forward.”
I knew better than to question him this time, so I just followed his orders. It was difficult to make myself move at a quick pace however, since I was blindfolded.
“Faster.”
I forced myself to walk a little faster, but stopped. If my memory was right, the building should have been right in front of me.
Rather than asking this time Fells smacked me on the back to make me move forward another few steps and, amazingly, I didn’t hit anything. Instead, I felt a rush of cold air and the smell of wet clay started to replace the fumes of hot asphalt and spray-on-deodorant that always covered the Sunset District in the summer.
“Just keep walking,” Fells whispered into my ear.
“When can I…”
“No talking!” he whispered forcefully.
I kept walking forward, completely blind. After a few feet, we began to go down a gentle decline, which quickly turned into a very steep one.
On the way down, I could hear several pairs of voices pass us. Some were traveling up and some passed us on their way down. A few stopped to say hello to Fells, but he never said more than a few words to them.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” I muttered, hoping he wouldn’t hear me. Moving downhill while completely blind was stressing me out. I don’t know how long we walked for, but I remember that just as was about to turn around and tell Fells to take me back up the decline stopped.
“We’re almost there. Just a little bit further.”
I trusted him and kept moving. A soft blue light leaked through the fabric of my blindfold and I started to feel an odd sensation on my skin. It was like a gentle hand was running it’s fingers over me. It felt strange and almost violating at first, but soon was relaxing. My heart even began to slow as I felt my stress melt away.
“Barrow, where have you been?”
“I went out for a bit, then I helped our friend make it down the tunnel.”
“He’s blind?”
“And mute.”
“Nice. My brother got heart disease today.”
“And what were you doing?”
“Procuring a few things from a house on the east side of the Sunset District. Everything went well.”
“Good to hear.”
“Yeah, but we had some trouble getting back. Do you know when they’re going to fix the entrance under…”
“You should go!” Fells yelled, cutting him off. “I mean, you should go and check with the team working on it. Go there now.”
“Ok,” the Truand said. He sounded a little suspicious, but I heard him walk away without another word.
I soon lost his footsteps amongst the dozens of others. From what I could hear, the place was quite busy.
“I can’t stay blindfolded. You told me I could see it.”
“You will. Just be patient.”
I didn’t want to be patient. It had taken me a year just to track down this one entrance. I had to make the most of this opportunity, because I might not get another one.
I reached up to try and untie the dingy rag covering my eyes, but was stopped.
“I told you to be patient.”
“I want to see it now.”
He ripped my hands down and held then next to my sides. “That isn’t how this works. You’re in my home, so at least have the courtesy to follow my rules.”
I reluctantly took his words to heart and left the blindfold in place. He led me forward again for several more feet until the ground started to become very muddy and the blue light bec
ame much brighter. I trusted Fells and allowed him to lead me into a pool of water until it came up to my waist. The water was warm and the bright reflections from its surface allowed me to make out a few figures standing around me. There were several others in the water. All of them were chanting a poem I had heard while researching the Truands. Each of them was at a different place, and as each individual person finished the poem they placed something in the water and pushed it away.
“Do you know what they’re saying?” Fells asked me.
“I think so. I saw it written somewhere in the archives.”
“Say it and take off the blindfold.”
At first I couldn’t quite remember, but I filled the gaps in my memory by listening to the others.
Goddess of Light from the darkness of Hell,
Shepherd of Purgatory guide me well,
To our home that survived when Heaven fell,
This place, the Court of Myracell.
My heart sped up again when Fells untied the blindfold. As he took it off, I had to hold up my hands to shield my eyes from the bright light, but once I could see… words cannot describe that moment.
Myracell, the goddess worshipped by the Truands, was engraved on the ceiling and traced in bright blue, purple and green. I looked closer and saw that the lights were actually tiny glowing crystals that shimmered so perfectly as to make her almost seem like a vision from the sky.
“Here,” Fells said, handing me the blindfold. I looked around me and saw Truands putting cardboard signs, paper mache casts and makeshift crutches into the water before releasing them, allowing them to be carried down into a drain on the other side of the pool.
I placed the blindfold into the water and pushed it away, and it was strangely liberating.
“Stay close to me and keep that cap pulled down,” Fells told me. I followed him out of the water and finally was able to look around and see the place I had spent so much time hunting for.
Black Light: The Deplorable Savior Page 5
