Plaguelands (Slayers Book 1)

by Jae Hill

  “Where do you folks come from?” I asked. “I didn’t know there were other humans outside of the Republic. They tell us there are only mindless zombies east of the Rockies that eat flesh and blood.”

  “Oh, there’s those too,” Obadiah responded. “Vicious creatures. Still human, but barely. They’re farther east, in the Heartland. Sometimes they’ve raided as far west as Magic Valley, but ever since Highway Bridge, usually they don’t come farther east than The Faces.”

  “The Faces?” I asked.

  “Yeah, the great leaders of the ancient times, carved in stone for all eternity. Mocking us for our pride and defiance of the Lord.”

  “Wait…‘The Lord’?” I said, curious. “So you’re not zombies, but you worship the Space-God?”

  “Space-God?” Obadiah laughed. “Boy, I think we’re talking different languages, but we’re saying the same thing. We believe in one God, the almighty Father who reigns from Heaven. He sent the Great Plague upon us to condemn us for our wickedness, and only when we are worthy of His favor will He restore us to better times and rid us of the metal and demon scourges. We, that is my house and my tribe, are Zionists: we seek to move West and reclaim the lands once held by our ancestors to build God’s paradise on Earth.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh at him. The Bible, as we had studied it, was no more than a fairy tale, a collection of stories put together more than six thousand years ago by a group of primitive mystics and false prophets. The strict adherence to that book had killed more people than any other cause throughout all of history. It had prevented science, reason, and logic from taking over the planet. For thousands of years, religion had been the cause of humanity’s hopelessness.

  I kept laughing until Obadiah slapped me hard across the face with the back of his hand. A trickle of blood washed into my mouth from where my teeth had pierced my lip. I had never been hit before. Ever. I didn’t know how to react. Instinctively, I raised my own hand to hit him back, but I caught a glimpse of his gun in his hand.

  “You will not blaspheme before the Lord,” he said sternly. “That is punishable by death, but since you haven’t received His word or love, you cannot be condemned for not knowing of His laws.”

  I was absolutely stunned. Speechless.

  “You may stay here tonight, boy,” he stated gently. “You should learn of the true history of mankind and of the goodness of the word of the Lord. What is your name?”

  “I’m Pax,” I replied. “It’s an ancient Latin word for peace.”

  “Peace?” the old man chuckled. “Boy, your people know nothing of that word.”

  Rebekah grabbed my hand and led me out of the tent.

  “I am SO confused,” I said quietly as we walked toward the fire. “Our society teaches us that those who worshipped the Space-God are mindless zombies who destroy and kill. But you’re not. You’re weird, but not evil.”

  “Well, you’re pretty weird to us too, Pax,” she said. “We’ve been raised our whole lives to believe that the problems of the world were caused by your people. That you abandoned God and gave up humanity. You challenged God to be immortals. That the Plague was cast upon us because of your actions and that the truly worthy ascended to Heaven, while those left behind still had to prove themselves before the Lord to rise to his palace forever.”

  “You believe that there’s a palace in the sky where the Lord dwells?” I asked, incredulously.

  “Yes, I do,” she answered, unwaveringly. “And when I die, if I’ve been worthy, I’ll live there with my ancestors who were worthy of eternal life.”

  I was becoming upset. “So when my people seek eternal life, it’s evil and worthy of a plague, but when your people do it, it’s okay?”

  “Such things are not ours to give, but to be bestowed by the Lord for a life of faith and righteousness,” she answered.

  They seemed like good people. Misguided, absolutely, but not evil. I was confused by a childhood filled with tales of mindless zombies and how worship of the Space-God was the reason for their existence. Clearly there were two sides of the story, but with all of my analytical prowess, I’d never considered that.

  Rebekah and I walked back to my camp, where I packed up my tent and camping gear. She was perplexed by such things as my top-fuel camp-stove and my compass watch with the built-in altimeter and barometer. She couldn’t even contemplate things like satellites and space travel, laughing as if I was telling a joke.

  We returned to the camp just as the men were returning from their day’s hunt. All of them had long beards like Obadiah’s. A few of them carried large game bags filled to the brim with bison meat. They must have shot the animals in the Preserve, which meant that they had unwittingly committed a crime against the Republic. I hoped they had escaped undetected.

  At night, during dinner around the fire, they were all both wary and curious of me. They asked questions about where I came from. Most of them had never seen the ocean, so describing that was difficult. None of them had ever been west of the Rocky Mountains. None of them had seen tall pines or giant glaciers. None of them had ever been to a city. None of them had ever seen electricity until I flicked on my lantern, much to their startled amazement.

  I was a spectacle for them to behold, a curiosity who represented the menace that they feared. But I did find out a lot about them and the rest of the world in the process.

  There were four families that belonged to this group, the house of Obadiah. They were all inter-related by marriage or blood, but their Biblical adherence to rules over mating kept genetic problems from arising. Rebekah’s father, Zed, and a few of her brothers, had died at “The Battle of Highway Bridge,” but no one would talk about that event any further. Her mother had died during childbirth with her younger sister, who didn’t survive the ordeal.

  Apparently there were thousands more people like them in other communities on the eastern flank of the Rocky Mountains, but they were all being pushed West by an incursion of people more closely matching my childhood description of zombies. These Zionists had left the northern town of Great Falls in search of more game and had been thrilled to find the large roaming herds of elk and bison along the edge of the preserve. I tried to caution them against killing too many of the animals, but Obadiah scoffed at me and said they had faith that the Lord was guiding them to a better fate, and that all was transpiring according to His plan.

  The long discussions around the fire were interesting and intellectually stimulating. We had different words for different things. What we called “bison,” they called “buffalo.” What we called “elk,” they called “deer.” What we called “space,” they called “heavens.” Sometimes I had to ask for explanation, but sometimes I used the context clues to figure it out for myself.

  All the while, Rebekah sat close to me and hung on my every word. When some of the other girls got too close or attentive, she got possessive and catty. She looked at me the way Adara had looked at me a few times: with that animalistic desire to possess and control. Rebekah is a beautiful woman, and I can’t deny that I was feeling similar things toward her, but having grown up in a society that forbade such thoughts and actions, I didn’t even know where to start.

  I went to sleep that night, in my own tent, not too far from Obadiah’s tent where he and the matriarch of their house, Ruth, slept. I crept out of my tent to go relieve myself in the woods and became aware of someone stalking along behind me. I was sure it was Rebekah, darting from tree to tree, keeping an eye on me. By the time I returned to my tent, she was nowhere to be found.

  The next morning, I awoke to find my bag had been rummaged through outside my tent. My lantern, stove, and a variety of other items were missing. Obadiah gathered the clan together and ordered everyone to return my items to me. “Thou shall not steal,” he chided them, “even from outsiders.” By noon, everything was back in front of my tent.

  Rebekah invited me to spend the afternoon picking berries with her. Of course, I had been invited to go hunt game with
the men and was expected to partake of more “manly” responsibilities with the group, but I again warned Obadiah against shooting the bison. Even if they had ranged off the official boundary of the Yellowstone Preserve, the animals had been placed there by the Republic research outpost and were the property of the Republic.

  I learned more about her family. Her aunts and uncles and cousins who travelled with the group. Since her parents were dead, Obadiah and Ruth had taken her in, and promised her a better life in the West.

  While we picked berries and dug up wild tubers, she told me more of stories from the Bible and how those stories helped people live better lives. I couldn’t deny that to primitive societies like Israelites—or even the Zionists—that book was invaluable. It had fables with important morals. It had laws for dividing property, and fairness in business dealings. It offered hope of something better beyond a life filled with sorrow, suffering, and a lack of meaning.

  I couldn’t help but reflect on the desires of my society and the culture of the Zionists. We both wanted a better world. We both wanted to find the meaning of the world around us. We both wanted eternal life. We both wanted to serve a greater cause. We were not so different. My lightweight tent may have been a twentieth of the weight of their tents, but it kept the rain off just the same. My clothes may have been brighter and more durable, but they served the same function. We were just more evolved. Our societies could have learned a lot from each other and grown together, had they not been so fearful of the other.

  Rebekah took off her bonnet in the midday sun. She said she was supposed to wear it at all times, but since no one else was around to chastise her for uncovering her hair, and I wouldn’t tell, she was going to get away with it. Her simple act of rebellion was endearing. I wished I could have told her about my act. Rebelling against the expectation that I’d undertake the surgery. Racing across the continent to save Semper.

  Semper. Rebekah was the only thing keeping him out of my mind. When my mind would start to wander to him, and his death, I would look at her with all of her simple beauty and try to keep the anger and fear out of my mind. I started wondering if the Zionists were right. What if there was a Heaven? Maybe Semper was there, waiting for me. Maybe keeping an eternal life on Earth deprived us of an eternal life in some other plane of existence.

  I shrugged that out of my mind. I had studied astrophysics. I knew how the tiniest of sub-atomic particles worked. I knew how vast the universe was. If there still hadn’t been a glimpse of Heaven or God, I doubted there ever would be.

  But then, when I looked at Rebekah one more time, I wondered to myself how something so beautiful could have happened purely by chance.

  WARRIOR FORMS

  The next morning we sat around the fire, eating a breakfast of small-game stew and berries. It was surprisingly delicious for consisting of squirrels and rabbits. In my world, adults couldn’t judge the right amount of spices or flavorings to put into things because their sensors were so oversensitive that they couldn’t tell what would taste good for the kids. Instead, our meals were very basic—nutritional, but bland. Every meal I’d had with the Zionists had been a treat, even if odd or exotic. I licked every last drop of sticky broth from my bowl and took it over to the wash bucket to be boiled clean.

  The sonic booms startled me and I instinctively dropped to the ground. There were a dozen thunderous cracks in rapid succession and, looking up, I could see the streaks of fire overhead. They might have been meteors streaking through the sky, but in an instant, their formation told me what they were: warrior forms.

  I had seen a documentary on them once, but few people had ever seen them in person. Our society had to deal with the zombie threat, far-flung colonies that might have rebelled, and even the potential for encountering hostile species on other worlds, so the warrior forms were created. Those who had excelled in tolerating their enhanced forms, and who had the desire to serve our society for eternity, were removed from their enhanced forms and reinserted again into warrior forms. These massive robots look only remotely like a human being. Reflective face-shields cover an array of sensors instead of an actual face. There is no hair or synthetic skin. There are no blinking eyes or moving lips. They are ten-foot tall alloyed killing machines with hyper-advanced sensors and unimaginable strength. They have built-in lethal, nonlethal, and explosive types of weapons. Electronic jammers. Tear gas. Gauss rifles. Mini-missiles. Each warrior can easily destroy a city block…and there were a dozen being inserted from orbit at the GEO station.

  “RUN!” I yelled, and grabbed Rebekah’s hand, dragging her to her feet.

  She hesitated, staring skyward like the rest of her clan. Twenty seconds later, it was too late, and over almost as quickly as it began.

  The silvery teardrops unfolded into giant robots about a hundred meters over our heads. The warrior forms decelerated just a few meters above the ground, deploying air brakes and firing retro rockets that literally stopped their descent the exact millisecond they would have otherwise crashed into the earth. The warriors began indiscriminately firing into the crowd, and I could only catch glimpses of misty sprays of blood as they began killing the dozen or so people huddled around the smoky fire. The Zionists didn’t even have time to grab their guns or defend themselves. Not that it would have helped. I ran, dragging Rebekah, who tripped behind me. She was light, and I yanked her to her feet. We ducked past trees being ripped to splinters by supersonic projectiles. I could feel the heat from the exploding missiles behind us. The camp was utterly destroyed. We ran in jagged swerving patterns, dodging the bullets and debris, Rebekah’s hand in mine. We ran from the carnage…with a warrior in hot pursuit.

  Suddenly, Rebekah screamed and fell to the ground. She had been grazed on the outer thigh by a bullet There was a lot of blood but her leg would be okay. I hoped she could move, but she couldn’t run any farther. She cowered in fear, so I crouched in front of her body, hoping to shield her from the on-coming warriors. I was certain it was the end for both of us.

  The closest warrior form raised its arm to fire a salvo at us and then stopped. It lowered its arm.

  “Pax?”

  The voice sounded vaguely familiar, and then I realized who it belonged to. Confused doesn’t even begin to describe the emotions surging through me.

  “Pax, it’s me. Adara.”

  I shook with fear. Rebekah was crying. The shiny metal monster stood staring directly at me.

  “Pax, what are you doing out here?” she demanded.

  “Adara, how can that be you? Semper said you were dead.”

  “No, Pax. I excelled at the enhanced form. I completed all the tasks required and mastered all the skills in three months: a new record. So they offered me the warrior form.”

  “Why would you agree to that?” I asked.

  “Originally, I said no, that I’ve never been aggressive and never killed anything in my life, and I couldn’t do it. They said that was why they needed me specifically, because I could control myself. They offered me so many opportunities. The chance to live at GEO. The chance to travel. The chance to run for political office. The chance to really make a difference. So they plucked me out of my new body and put me in here. One hundred years of service and then I can decide if I want to go back to a regular enhanced form and a normal life.”

  Rebekah, sobbing, finally regained enough composure to scream at Adara.

  “You killed them! You killed my whole family!”

  Adara lifted her weapon-clad forearm defensively. “I had orders. The GEO Ops Commander was monitoring an incursion of primitives into the Preserve and ordered our drop on your position. You still haven’t answered me, Pax. What are you doing here?”

  I told her everything. About Semper’s surgery and his escape from the hospital and his death. About finding the Zionists. About how the Zionists weren’t the mindless zombies that the government had portrayed them as.

  “Pax, there really are zombies out here. They hardly speak English anymore. They are
deformed by the Plague. They will kill you or anyone they come across. I know this because I’ve killed dozens of them. Maybe hundreds. This isn’t my first drop.”

  “What are you going to do to us?” Rebekah asked angrily.

  By now a few of the other warriors had gathered around curiously. Adara looked at them. I could only imagine she was using her neural web to talk to them.

  “We usually leave one primitive alive to spread the word. We won’t kill the girl. And Pax, you’re still a citizen of the Cascadia Republic, with no charged crimes, so you’re free to go.”

  “Go where, Adara?”

  “Wherever you see fit. Wherever you want. You can go home, if you like,” she said, pointing to the west. “But don’t take her back to the capital. My biological scanner indicates that she’s carrying a few disease variants that would spread quickly and be fatal to children back home. You’ll probably even need to be quarantined.”

  “Where are you going, Adara?”

  “A dropship will be here in four minutes to retrieve us and take us back to GEO station. I suggest you clear out before they get here. I’m sorry, Pax, for this. They were encroaching. I had to do this, I had orders.”

  Rebekah started to protest and I put my hand over her mouth. She got the hint. The warrior forms began walking away toward a clearing to the south.

  Adara looked back over her metal shoulder as she strode out of sight, “It was good to see you, Pax. Take care out there.”

  I couldn’t have given her a hug if I wanted to. Adara—that soft skinned, sweet-smelling girl who I’d always felt funny around—was now a two-ton hulk of metal and death.

  I helped Rebekah hobble back to the remnants of our camp, strewn with the bodies of the very nice people who were kind enough to take me in. I felt angry at the government for ordering an attack on such nice people, but at the same time, I understood that anyone entering the boundary of the Preserve would be seen as a threat and needed to be eliminated. The Republic had very few settlements on the planet, but protected each of them vigorously.