The Prophet: Death: A Sci-Fi Thriller
Page 17
David went right up to the man and stopped in front of him. The fat guy barely saw him in time; he was concentrating so hard on the food in his hand. I hadn’t moved, but sat in one of the building’s deep nooks, looking out and knowing that in the next few moments, I’d be alone forever.
David said something to the guy, and I still remember the man smiling. It was as if he thought the whole thing a joke. Whatever was in his hand, it was messy, and I remember grease dripping off it to the ground while he smiled. Calories going to waste, and David saw it too.
David said something else, and the smile on the man’s face sank. It didn’t just disappear; it actually sank into his face as if it might not ever return.
David spoke again, and the man’s hand started shaking, thus the food did too. The fat guy looked around to see if anyone else was seeing this, but no one took any notice. David kept his eyes only on the fat man’s. Finally, stupefied and scared, he handed the food over.
David stared at him for a few more moments, and to me, it seemed like he was cementing something with the man. Somehow saying, if you get me in trouble for this, I’ll kill you.
He walked back at the same pace he’d left with, and it wasn’t until he got to the nook that the anger faded.
“Let’s go,” he’d said.
“What did you say?”
“It doesn’t matter. We have to leave.”
We bolted and didn’t end up eating for another half hour. That was the first time I saw the man David would become, even if I didn’t know it. He would turn into a leader who ruled with both rage and care—though his care for the people he loved often drove the rage he showed them.
I’m getting to it … I keep telling you, none of this will make sense if you don’t see it as I did.
We spent two years like that before the Unformed’s arrival.
That’s what it felt like, an arrival. Not a visit. Not a message. An arrival, because It never left.
Veritros, I think, experienced it differently. I don’t know about Abby. If the Unformed made a mistake anywhere, it was in Its arrival. David could have died right then, ending everything. To the Unformed, years are like seconds, but Its time is running out, and It knows that. So the years spent grooming David, ensuring he would be the Prophet—they counted, and the Unformed would have had to start all over. If It could at all. I don’t understand how It chooses, so perhaps David was the only soul available.
Either way, the Unformed nearly fucked everything up before it began.
The older David grew, the more adept he became at theft. He let me help when he needed it, but he usually tried to keep me out of danger.
That day, it couldn’t be helped. I had to participate.
Remember, we didn’t steal currency. When we absolutely had to, we’d steal clothes. Clothing was important, but mainly because it created opportunities for us to steal what we really wanted: food.
I still remember the food stand. The man who owned it was older, and that influenced David’s choice for obvious reasons. The stand was relatively large, and the old man rotated it between ten different platforms in a single city. David had scouted him for days. Our food scores were bigger now, and while it created more danger in the moment, it also kept us from having to steal every damned day.
David’s plan revolved around the man’s food preparation. He did food prep each day before he started selling. Bread and cheese were the main ingredients, but he had some vegetables too. A little bit of meat. The man rose early, before the SkyLight brightened, and so David did too while scouting him. The stand was big enough for the man to live inside—combining it as his place of work and home. The front was the restaurant; people walked inside, ordered, then took their food to go. There was a small bedroom and a kitchen in the back.
David wanted to get him during the prep. The world still slept, and if we did it right, we could knock the old man unconscious so that by the time he did wake up, we’d be long gone. Just take the loot and go.
He needed me because of the amount of food; he couldn’t possibly carry it all himself.
The morning of, we woke up early—long before the old man—and went to the food stand. It was an old thing, made of metal. It looked well kept enough, but you could tell he wasn’t going to spend money upgrading it.
David said that each morning, as soon as the old man got up, he came outside and did 15 laps around the stand for his morning exercise. We were waiting for him. David subdued him easily, even at 14. He wasn’t big, but he’d been doing it for years and become both strong and efficient. Most people want to wrestle when they get into an altercation. David wasn’t doing any of that. He disabled people, and that’s what he did with the old man. A light punch to the throat had him gagging and kept him from screaming. A harder slug in his stomach took all the air completely out of him, hunching him over. David grabbed him by the back of the neck and walked him into the stand without saying a word. I trailed behind, closing the door as we went in. I remember peering out into the night air, thinking how easily we’d done it. I thought he was a genius, David, because no one had seen a thing, and it only took a few seconds to finish the whole endeavor.
Now, it’s funny that I thought it was finished. All we had to do was load up the food in our bags and get out. Nothing to it.
I was living in a world before the Unformed, and that meant I didn’t understand anything. Nothing was finished. We were both about to get ourselves killed.
David hustled the man into the kitchen; for his part, the old man was still bent over gasping for air.
“There it is,” he told me, pointing with his free hand to the refrigerator
David tossed the old man onto a chair. I moved to the refrigerator and tried opening it, but it was locked. I looked over at David, not knowing what to do. David had never actually been inside the stand, so this wasn’t expected.
David squatted down next to the owner. “In a minute, you’re going to be able to breathe again, and you’re probably going to want to scream for help. Don’t.”
His voice was low as he spoke, and back then, I didn’t understand how much discipline that took. David was 14, and almost any other criminal would have been screaming at the old man, wanting to get the refrigerator open and get out of there. Not David. He understood at a deep level that the control he needed would come from his rage, but not from its expression. He might have lost that understanding later in life, but back then, he was mesmerizing.
“Because when you scream, the very moment you do, I’m going to kill you. We’ll steal your food and be out of here before anyone has a chance to catch us. But, if you help us, when we’re finished you’ll have a bit less food, but you’ll have your life. Do you understand?”
The old man looked David in the eyes, and saw the same truth as I always did. David wasn’t lying about anything. David was the truth.
He nodded, and then David nodded back. He patted the old man’s knee, a gesture that seemed much older than a 14 year old should give.
He stood up, moving to the side of the chair and keeping his hand on the man’s shoulder. Letting his presence be constantly known.
“Tell us how to open it.”
Everything froze. I don’t know any other way to describe it. Us, the world, even time—it all stopped. I don’t know if anyone else has ever seen the Unformed arrive. They didn’t with Abby or Veritros, so I may be the only person to witness such a thing.
It was horrifying.
David’s head jerked upward as if something had grabbed him by the hair and yanked backward. He stared up at the ceiling, his mouth open.
“David?”
His left hand, the one resting on the old man’s shoulder, slipped off and fell down to his side. That’s when I knew something was truly wrong. David never took his hands off the mark once we were alone with them.
I took a step away from the refrigerator, but moved no closer. I was scared. Do you understand that? David was all I had in this world, and if that old m
an had pulled out a knife and put it to David’s throat, I would have thrown myself at him. Fought him with every ounce of strength I had.
But when David looked up at the ceiling like that, I was scared. It wasn’t that I knew something was wrong … it was the degree of it.
That’s what I understood immediately. The air crackled with it. The old man stared at David, too—just as frightened as me now, and not because we were robbing him.
I took a step closer, and I saw them for the first time.
His eyes.
The pupils snowy gray. The lights were low in the room, and his eyes were illuminating the area above his face—like nanoparticles can sometimes do in pitch black. Only, this wasn’t green. It was the gray of Gods. You call It the Black, and you do it to scare people, but you should have called It the Gray. That’s Its true color.
I know what happened with Veritros when the Unformed came to her, and this was different.
David’s head remained facing the ceiling for a few more seconds, and then he slowly looked forward. His neck moved as if it were an ancient machine—slow and steady like someone was turning a hand crank somewhere. His eyes blazed but he wasn’t looking at me. It was the Unformed.
You might not believe that, but I don’t care.
For that moment, the Unformed possessed David, and It looked out on our world.
Gray webs shot from his eyes, wicked fast and spreading across the room. It only took them seconds to fully encapsulate me, wrapping me in a cocoon. The old man, too. I could see him, though I wasn’t able to move at all. The light was ephemeral, something that you could move your hand through if you wanted, but when it grabbed hold of me, it was as strong as steel.
Pure energy.
That’s something you don’t understand. The energy inside the Unformed. It may be everlasting. It may be slow to action. We may not truly understand much of It, but … Its energy …
It’s ancient. Energy that comes from somewhere beyond our universe. It might look like electricity, but it’s no closer to that than a painting of the ocean is to salt water.
The webs moved through the food stand in seconds, then broke the metal door straight off its hinges. The walls inside were lighting up green, the gray light somehow activating every nanoparticle in the place. The webs continued spreading outside in quick, brilliant bursts. The sky had been dark when we entered, but they lit it in a pale, gray light.
And still, they didn’t stop spreading.
Further and further into the world, climbing up the large building that cast its shadow over the food stand—going where anyone and everyone could see it.
I stared forward, not understanding. Only knowing that whatever held me could kill me, and that the person in front of me wasn’t my brother.
Now, looking back, I think the Unformed was taking a measure of our world. It wanted to understand as much as It could in a short period of time. To actually experience Earth.
All the energy and power It possesses, the Unformed doesn’t truly understand our world, let alone our universe. It only knows Its own habitat is being destroyed, and It needs to repopulate here, in a universe that is forever expanding. I think It’s curious, though. For the first time in Its life, It’s experiencing something new, and It wants to know more.
Perhaps It understood greed was getting the best of It, that to continue spreading would have consequences. Perhaps It grew bored. I only know that one moment the gray light held me in its cocoon, and the next, it was gone.
Vanished.
I struggled for air, my chest able to expand again.
David’s eyes were fading. The old man next to him was dead—the first murder David ever committed. The light had strangled him, or maybe given him a heart attack, but he sat sagging in the chair, his head drooping to his chest.
That was how It arrived, and David was never the same after. It nearly ruined everything with Its need to understand. I guess It got lucky. No one was looking outside their rooms, or if they were, they didn’t understand what they saw.
Before, our life had been focused on survival and food.
After, none of that mattered. Survival and food were only inputs that served a greater machine. They were no longer the end, but the means to an end. I was nine. I only knew what David told me. It’s not much different than what you do to the True Faith’s young. You get them early and you can do whatever you want with them. Turn them into Priests or Prophets, I suppose.
I followed him nearly 20 years. What he told me in the beginning, it stuck for a long, long time.
But eventually, I grew disillusioned. Eventually, I understood he had to be stopped.
Any happiness Rebecca had felt died. She lay on her cot, exhausted. The First Priest left and she was glad for it, but venturing back to David …
It always wrecked her, and this time had been no different.
The Unformed might have been curious, but the First Priest wasn’t. He said he wanted to know about David and the Unformed, but he only thought he wanted to know. He didn’t actually. The First Priest asked questions as if there was an end to this. As if Rebecca telling David’s story could somehow give him an answer that would end all the questions.
It led him to a linear, chronological question style.
What happened? And then what? And then what?
And to go down that path would reveal some truth, but it would only take you in a straight line from David’s birth until he fell out of that sky.
A whole other world existed around that life, even if it was hard to see, and the Priest refused to even look.
That allowed Rebecca to lie, and she had at the end. She didn’t simply understand that David had to be stopped. That would have been some innate burst of knowledge, or at least a gradual understanding through watching her brother. That never happened, not to her nor anyone else who joined his cause. Once you took the Blood, you were in, and no one ever ventured out again.
Except for me.
Over and over again, people had asked Rebecca why she’d done it. Even the First Priest, but none actually wanted the answer. They wanted confirmation of what they’d already formed in their heads. David was evil. She loved mankind. On and on and on, they had their own ideas.
The truth was something very different than anything they thought. There was no innate burst. As in all matters with gods, there was revelation.
The word’s etymology traced back—as all did—to long before the Reformation. It meant to ‘lay bare’.
And things had been laid bare for Rebecca.
A revelation, and the meaning behind it—even with David deceased—still terrified her. The revelation meant that regardless of how long David was dead, she would never truly escape him.
Fourteen
The First Priest hated returning to the One Path. He almost felt as if he was experiencing déjà vu, having done this before only a little over a week ago. His entire life had been lived beneath ground, and now in the course of two weeks, he was visiting another Ministry for the second time.
It’s different now, he thought.
And it was. Last time he’d been terrified and unsure, knowing that his own death was certain unless he perfectly maneuvered himself. It wouldn’t be his death this time, though, but the High Priest’s.
Are you sure?
The First pushed the thought away, refusing to focus on the fear traveling within him. If he couldn’t force it out of the transport, fine, but he didn’t have to speak with it. The High Priest might have Disciples, but even they couldn’t defeat everything he was bringing.
You saw one almost kill the weapon.
Damn it, shut up, his mind spat back.
The transports flying toward the High weren’t part of the Black, which the Disciples had been engineered to fight against. Their nanotech learned in ways that others couldn’t, and that’s how the gray light had failed in the sky. What were they going to learn here? How to fly when the structure holding them in the air collapsed?
The First was worrying for nothing.
“How often have you been speaking with her?”
The First Priest’s head jerked to his right, snapping out of his thoughts. He’d practically forgotten the Priestess was next to him, and that wasn’t good. He shouldn’t ever forget she was here with him, not even for a second. The Council had designated the two of them to go, and the First understood the politics. She was the most likely to challenge him for the High’s position.
“Speaking with who?”
“The informant. Hollowborne.”
The First had let the Priestess listen in last night as Hollowborne told the weapon’s story. He’d wanted her to see what he was doing with his time, the information he was gaining. Truth be told, though, he hadn’t done much since starting this trip. He spoke to her last night, but that was it—he’d been so busy worrying about what was to come, he hadn’t looked into anything else.
“Daily,” he said.
“Are you learning anything useful?”
“Did you hear anything useful last night?” the First Priest asked.
She nodded. “Yes. Some.”
“She does ramble a lot, but it’s almost impossible to keep her from doing it. Still, it’s more direct knowledge about the weapon and the Black than anything we’ve ever heard before.”
The Priestess said nothing else and the First Priest returned to looking out the window. He no longer cared about the sky; it held none of the allure that it had for him on his first trip. He wanted to get back beneath ground as quickly as possible, with this new woman in tow, and perhaps the High Priest title draped over him.
“You really want to keep her?” the Priestess asked, bringing him out of his thoughts again.
Would she just shut up?
“It’s for the best. You see the information I’m gathering from the others. To have someone actually capable of using the weapon’s powers; the knowledge we’ll gain might be endless.”