Cain licked his poisonous teeth and nodded.
“Mm…Yeah.” He giggled and folded his hands prayerfully.
“Thought so. Now, let me ask you something else. Do you have any idea how much I’m going to make you pay for it?” Elias lashed out and closed his hand around the Witchdoctor’s throat. Madeline cried out, startling some of the wildlife. She clapped both hands over her mouth, eyes wide as silver dollars and shook her head fiercely.
Elias’s hand clamped down with all its strength around the Witchdoctor’s windpipe. Yet the old magician didn’t flinch or struggle. He only smiled, purring like a toucan with psychotic giggling.
“You can strangle the breath out of the living, young sir. I’m not the living, though, am I?” The Witchdoctor winked.
“Your wife seems to think you were reborn?” Elias smirked. The Witchdoctor purred and nodded.
“I was…somewhat. I found a way to suspend my own animation! My curse became immortality, Elias. I can make the most of a bad situation. Can you?” His eyes danced in his face, child-like and pleading. Elias nodded. A smile spread across his face and soft laughter rose from him faint as the whisper in pressurized smoke.
“If I set my mind to it, I can do just about anything. Even get the better of you. Don’t underestimate a desperate man. Definitely not one that’s dying as slow as I’ve been dying all my life.” Elias’s felt something brutal pass through his body. A savage jerk, not his own ferocity but ferocity he’d absorbed from the earth, the wind, the sky. The anger and the agony of those that had died by this man’s degrees. He knew that for all that remained of the once green and wholesome world, he would have to be the stand-in. He would have to fill those empty shoes and empty graves and bring this puppetry of death to a peaceful close.
“Haven’t I made death only that much more beautiful by exhuming the bodies of every mortal soul? Elias. Come on.” The Witchdoctor chuckled. He wasn’t struggling against Elias’s clamping fist and it might be a fruitless waste of strength. But Elias didn’t let go.
“You might be beyond saving. That doesn’t mean that the rest of the World should have to languish under your disease for the rest of…well, just the rest.” Elias swallowed, weighing his every word like it might be his last.
No matter what this guy did, he wasn’t backing down. He couldn’t. He felt the shadow of his friends behind him. His little brother was still prostrate on the ground, panting under the weight of all those godless things his comrades had done to him.
“A world like this, without humanity, without compassion, isn’t worth saving. I’ll pass it off as your age. Naivety is forgivable in the young, Elias Walklate. Just don’t make the same mistake twice.” The Witchdoctor raised a slender hand.
Now Elias could see that his hand’s skin was withered and chapped, spotted with ashen places. His fingernails had grown to tapered points, also dipped in brass. He dangled them in the air like he was contemplating where to pierce into Elias body with them. Elias laughed and swung the Witchdoctor over his head.
“Stupid! I don’t want to save the world. If there’s a single man left scurrying this rock that hates it and wants to see it end, it’s me!” shouted Elias. “We agree on this much. The World and its federations are in no way worth saving! But its people are. Because, for every rotten heart, for every bag of stumbling flesh you’ve unleashed on this planet, there is something earthy at the core. Something truly worthy of our concern and care. There’s humanity. Separating men from their vices, you have only children.”
Elias gnashed his teeth, remembering a sea of faces. Of children that he had known and loved. They were now just colors of a distant, radiant past that could never be again.
“You created this mess. Now…I’m going to lay down some law to you. If it costs me body and soul and you curse me to a thousand pits below Hell that’s fine! You’re still not going to stop me. I remember what the children of this place were like. I still hear their laughter. I taste the acid of their tears. I will avenge them. By God, I will avenge them. If I can save the rest, then that’s just the consummation of all miracles. Where the golden circle closes ‘round the sun.” Elias bit his lip, surprised by his own words.
He felt the sky opening above him. Ever since he was a boy, he’d imagined that the sun moved in circles around the earth, closing in a wedding band of light. The vow that heaven made to this place, the holy matrimony of Mankind with the Celestial would be complete. Ever since he’d been a little child, able to think and imagine, he wanted to believe that out beyond his walls and out beyond the sky there was an Eternity caught up in a divine romance. That there away beyond the smoke, there was life and salvation.
“Did you come here thinking your faith would be rewarded?” Cain held his breath. Elias saw the resolve cracking. Something was desperate within the scourge of earth too. Maybe they could reach an armistice?
“I came looking for answers and thinking I could earn them.” Elias shrugged.
Cain’s eyes floated to the edge of the path. He nodded in that direction, but Elias refused to look. Cain gasped in irritation.
“Ach! You are rather obtuse, but aren’t you? How ironic it is when a man leads his horse to water and still the beast refuses to drink. See for yourself. It appears your trusted rebellion leader has betrayed you, doesn’t it?” Cain took Elias’s chin and turned him to face the path.
Elias’s heart stopped. His eyes narrowed. Yim could be seen in the clearing now. Her knees knocked and her hair was tousled. She had the look of a person who had failed. For once in her life, Meredith Yim’s exploits had not gone to plan.
Elias was distracted for a moment from whatever the Witchdoctor wanted him to see. In this clearing, there were many standing stones. Yim’s men were scattered among them. Already Elias could pick out Madeline pinned between some jagged sandstone tooth shaped boulders. He saw Trent, ironically pinned down on his own face. But where?
Riff was pushed in a fairy ring of stones that looked like a giant play pen. He clung to them, jaw gaping in terror. It took every fiber of Elias’s being not to run to him for pure joy. He was alive and that was the only thing that mattered for a moment.
But then Elias’s eyes followed his brother’s gaze. The meaning of this moment changed. He saw what the Witchdoctor’s visceral form had intended for him too.
“I promised you results. The power to stabilize the puppets! A poison that could make the living move at that same mindless command. All the secrets of the universe and more are contained in that Shrine…”
Yim was about to say something else. Just then Queen Nali herself came strolling through the stones. She pulled a javelin out of a sheath at her thigh and held it to Yim’s throat.
“I think that you’ve been lying to me this entire while. You might have taken me for a fool because of my young age. Do not forget that it was I who entered Africa first. I who allowed for this damn fool expedition to even succeed as much as it has when your hires set fire to the Blood City—the main output source of weaponry in my Trade Federation-backed empire. Yim, that is how much stock that I and my investors have put on your business venture here in Africa.” Nali tilted her head to the side to see if Yim was following everything she was saying.
“Which means that you won’t kill me until you get your results.” Yim smiled.
Nali’s smile was cold enough to freeze Elias’s heart from this distance.
“The world that came before me was docile like that. I understand how you could be mistaken. Let me remind you that I am the harvester of bones. They dance on my strings and they do my bidding. What it means is that if you can’t deliver what I hired you to deliver death will not come easy for you like it does others. I will devise a new brutality and you will be the first to explore it.” Nali twisted the javelin, cutting small pieces from Yim’s hair. Yim swallowed and looked at her feet. Nali blinked and nodded, circling around her.
“Answer me this, Meredith. Is it worth it?” Nali giggled. She drew a drop
let of blood from a small scratch on Yim’s cheek and let it drip onto her tongue.
“Was what?” Yim looked cornered. Elias was amazed. He had thought of her as some invincible femme fatale until this moment.
“You could fill the world with bones, Meredith. Trust me, I speak from experience. Yet all the vengeance in the World cannot slake the thirst for more. Is the sword you’ve drawn worth what it’s cost you to swing it?” Nali turned and tilted her head to the side.
“Is the chain that binds you to me worth the momentary empowerment of scratching the destroyer’s itch? Because now that you are entangled in my traps, you know that you can never leave.” Nali laughed as if that was supposed to be reassuring. Yim tilted her jaw in defiance.
“You’ve put a lot of faith in the chains you’ve clamped on the people of this Planet.” There were sudden tears in her eyes. Elias saw them catch fire in the sun. Even though they were definably enemies, he felt great reverence toward her in this moment.
“The thing about faith though is that it can be jaded. People you thought would never betray your trust cost you the life of your only son…” She shook herself scrubbing her face with her palms with an angry hiss.
“Faith is our eyes. Either we see through darkened eyes that only believe in evil and despair or we see on our horizons what we could put our hands on if we had the fortitude to keep moving toward it. You could punish me for the things I was unable to reach, but I couldn’t be guilty. I put forth the first few steps toward the impossible and I have gotten farther than any of your other charges. I deserve the credit of effort that none of the rest could ever receive. They talked while I walked. Why don’t you persecute your dreamers instead and let me do my job?” Yim spat into the dust.
Nali’s eyes went wide in disgusted surprise.
“Careful, Yim. The last person that was so disrespectful to me—”
“Save it, kid. The last person that was so disrespectful to your authority was Saxon Emmaus. He pulled a freaking Robinson Crusoe on this wilderness and now he’s practically the right-hand guy in a budding rebellion.
“I was wrong about everything. Thought playing my cards close to you would send me up the ladder sooner than later. I could learn a lot from those guys. From Elias. Hell, if anybody can take you down it’s him.” Yim rolled her head on her neck with a grim smile.
Nali was dumbstruck. Her bodyguards swooped in like ninja ravens, but she held up a finger to stop them.
“You have other interests, I think. I might be young, but I’m not stupid.” Nali giggled.
“Please! Everyone has other interests. Does anyone have any loyalty anymore? Right, then, let’s skip straight down to the quick of business.” Yim tossed her hair out of her eyes, face taking on a sudden eerie madness.
“I’m currently making investments in taking you out and becoming you, only better. I knew that the process isn’t instant, though. Getting close, tricking you into thinking that I had all the answers for you is how I meant to do it. A worm in the ashes of your dry rotting teeth. That’s where I’d wanted to kick you. I had style once and would have held off until it crept up on you like a cancer. What the hell, right? All caution to the winds of chance. Anything goes gentlemen!” Yim pulled a Smith and Wesson Model 29 from the waistline of her pants. She signaled with her thumb for her boys to move.
The gunfire came suddenly and they were locked in the fighter’s dance. Elias jumped. Even with the haphazard framework of Yim’s crazed plan, he’d never expected it to be like this.
“What is this? What are you showing me, you liar, you traitor!” Elias shook his head. He refused to believe anything he’d just seen. If it was real, then Yim could just be playing coy. It wasn’t unlike her to have an ulterior motive and a double agency.
“Mm, I am showing you only the facts. You and I are engaged in a game of wits and banter that’s only barely begun, young sir. Oh, I look forward to it all. But first, I believe you had a young brother you needed to look after?” The Witchdoctor’s voice receded. Elias looked around, trying to find where he’d disappeared.
“Riff!” Elias ran head down into the fray. His cries and his presence was lost in the battle.
“Eli!” Riff bolted through the fairy ring of stones. In that moment of battle and gore, the two brothers were so elated to find each other again that they ran right through bullets and barley felt their sting.
Elias fell into Riff’s arm. He clutched him heavily against his ribs, pressing both fists into his back.
“Elias, you’re alive…” Riff laid his chin on his older brother’s shoulder and closed his eyes.
“Yes. We both are.” Elias clung to his brother and felt the warmth of his blood. For thirty seconds, they could revel in this fact, forgotten. Against all odds, these two brothers, sons of the great Judas, had found their way to each other’s side once more.
THE END
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Doug McGovern
Doug McGovern is a sick-minded individual who lives in Upstate New York with his surprisingly normal wife, Nancy (an author of cozy mysteries with books on Amazon), and their three awesome kids.
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The Bone Puppets: A Hard SciFi Zombie Soldier Story Page 14
