by Dan Kemp
"What are you doing?"
She hauled back and hit him in the temple. Bits of asphalt chipped off and blood spurted from his eyebrow. He fell immediately unconscious, and the back of his head hit the road with a crack and a splat.
Skye climbed on top of him and hit him again. Again. Again. She could hear a woman's angry, frenzied, scream, then finally realized it was her own. The screaming gave way to hysterical laughter. His face was unrecognizable, bits of brain protruding from his crushed forehead. A pool of blood was steadily spreading around them.
Skye hit him one last time.
***
Two years later
"The attack on Black Creek was a mixed blessing."
Skye nodded her head, but let the two men continue talking. In front of her on the left stood her master, on the right the leader of the Robes.
The Robe went on. "We dealt a critical blow against them. A number of dead on their side but, more importantly, their electrical grid was disrupted."
"They will rebuild it," her master said, in a decidedly less charitable tone. "And those of us who actually fight in the field lost several good fighters. For what? A delay in their progress?"
"An opportunity to strike once again," was the retort. "With no power, time will weaken them, and we will destroy them."
They went on arguing, and Skye half-listened. Of course, not everything had gone as planned. People on both sides had died. They hadn't managed to get inside the town itself. Still, she was proud of what they had accomplished so far.
And yet, something nagged at the back of her mind. Seeing who these people really were, seeing how they lived had elicited a different response in her than she expected. Not just anger. Not guilt. Resentment, maybe jealousy.
"Skye," the Robe was saying now.
"Yes?"
"You are to be promoted."
She smiled, focused once again on the present moment. "Thank you, sir."
Skye followed the two men down a long hallway and into a small room. It was empty other than a reclining chair, like the ones she used to see in any dentist's office. The men closed the door behind her. She sat in the chair and laid back as the two men fastened leather straps over her wrists and ankles.
"This will not be pleasant," the Robe said, walking to the head of the chair and turning away. "But it will be quick."
When he turned back toward her he held a long needle and syringe, which contained a bright neon green liquid. When he drove the needle into her eye, she screamed and thrashed. The burning pain was worse than any she'd ever felt.
***
Her vision was just beginning to clear, but it still felt as if the needles had never left her eyes. Skye leaned over the sink to look in the warped, clouded mirror.
A small drop of blood still sat over the top of each pupil. Her irises, formerly a pale blue, now were a bright neon green. The artificial dye swirled, curled, and billowed around in the small chamber of each eye. It was almost hypnotic.
Skye splashed water from a basin over her face, then left the bathroom. The green-eyed Robe who had done this to her waited outside.
"There is one more thing. James has asked to meet with you," he said.
She followed him out of the building and across the compound. It was late at night, and the place was deserted aside from the few patrolling guards. He led her to the edge of camp, down a natural rock stairway, along the cliff face. They ended in a familiar place, in front of the cave on the sandy shore of a lake.
"He’s inside."
She took the torch, which burned as it had before in a brass sconce affixed to the rock, and entered the cave.
He was there, sitting at the small wooden table as he had been before. The same short, slick black hair. The same self-assured, almost infuriating smile on his face.
"Hello," he said.
"Hi," she replied, feeling a bit dumb.
"You’ve shown yourself to be one of my truest followers. So it is time you learn the truth." He indicated to a chair across from him. Skye pulled it out and quickly sat. "My name is Martin."
These words hit her like a truck, and she didn't know what to say.
"I see you are confused. I know you’ve heard my name before, have been told it was a lie. It wasn't, that is my name. But everything else you know about me is still true. I was born into this world with a particular gift. I once knew a time when mankind was strong. Resilient. The most versatile and adaptive species ever to exist. Something to be proud to be a part of.
"And yet, over time we grew lazy, complacent. So many lost all understanding of what came before us. So I destroyed the civilized world using that powerful gift I was given. To remind humanity of what it takes to survive. This is a story you already know, yes?"
"Yes," she agreed.
"Good. The only difference is me. Martin."
"Who is James then? Does he exist?"
"James is a man, like me, if you would call us men. But more importantly than that, he is an idea. An idea that must be stamped out, if what you and I strive for is to succeed."
"What idea is that?"
"The idea that the weak and helpless should be protected. That complacency, thought, and pity should come before strength, action, and competition."
"Why not just use your own name?"
He smiled a more genuine smile than she'd seen on him before.
"Because there's nothing he would hate more than to see all of this done in his name. I’m a very powerful man, but he is even more powerful, I must admit. I found out long ago that it’s not possible for me to defeat him directly. So I have taken another approach, and I will need help to truly defeat him. Will you help me, Skye?"
"Of course."
She left the cave not long after. Her mind still hadn’t processed all she had learned, and all that was still left to learn. But something inside felt wrong. Something intangible which just didn't add up. The things Martin said were no different than what she had already been taught. But they had lied to her, about who James was and what they all stood for. Most of them didn't even know the truth. Did any of them?
Something wasn't right. Though Skye couldn’t even put her own thoughts into words, she felt it there, like an empty void in the back of her mind which she might fill if only she probed deeper. And then everything began to unravel. Was she a fool? Tricked, brainwashed, as a man had accused her of not long ago? Skye had told herself it wasn’t possible, and still her mind rejected the idea, though the sense that something was wrong wouldn’t leave her.
Martin told her that James, whoever he was, was real and even more powerful than him. Skye had seen what this one could do; the entire world was living evidence of that. So she couldn't begin to imagine what a man more powerful than him would look like. What would he say? Would he take credit as well for this new world order, or would he abhor it? Whatever this truth was, she had to find it for herself, and if she was sure of anything at all it was that she wouldn't find it here. So, if needed, she would find it alone.
Skye left the camp under cover of darkness, slipping over the fence and disappearing down the road, unseen. And as she ran she felt as if a great weight lifted off of her. The further she ran from that place, the clearer her mind became. So she kept running, and she cried as she ran.
Act Three
Martin
Despite whatever would come later, he would always look back on his childhood fondly.
Martin, though he was known by another name in that time, was born in a tiny village in a land that was at that time nameless, nestled between a forest and the rocky plateaus lining the coast. His earliest memories were of his mother, whom he remembered as a beautiful woman, soft-spoken and kind.
The two of them lived in a little hut which sat on a short cliff overlooking the village on one side and the vast, open coastline on the other. It had only been the two of them for as long as he could remember, and he was happy for it to stay that way.
His mother always told him that he was
special, and Martin always believed it to be true. On the outside, he looked no different from the other boys, with one exception. His eyes were a bright, unnatural green, unlike any color he had seen. They almost seemed to glow, especially at night. His mother doted on him, and said that he was destined to be a great man. The others in the village may not see it yet, she would say, but he would be great all the same.
This last bit always confused him somewhat. The people of the village had always been kind to him, and when he was a child he played with the other young boys in the forest, or joined them leaping between the tall, craggy rocks against the warnings of their mothers. When he finally got tired in the evening, he would help his mother gather fruit, herbs, or wood for their fire. He was, overall, a very contented child.
On one occasion that stuck firmly in his mind, Martin had been chasing some of the other boys through the forest when he lost his way. It was an evening in the waning days of summer, and the setting sun had just come to rest atop the vast expanse of the ocean, its light casting ripples of orange and yellow out in wide arcs.
Realizing he had fallen behind the other boys, he slowed to a walk and called out their names. Over the chirping of insects in the forest he could hear their faint shouts and laughter, so he followed the sound. It was just when he left the treeline that his foot caught in a gap in the cliff. A loud crack rang out and the rock gave way beneath him. Martin fell, scrambling in vain to get a hold of something.
He tumbled and slid down the jagged slope until he landed with a heavy thud on the dirt at the bottom. The largest of the rocks had already fallen, but dust and pebbles still rained down on him from above. Martin rose to his feet, brushing off his arms and craning his head back to regard the sheer wall of rock before him. The only sound now was the lapping of the waves on the shore. Wherever the other boys had gone, he couldn’t hear them now.
The cliff face swelled outward and retreated inland in a serpentine pattern. Martin walked along it, letting his hand brush against the rock, which had been worn smooth by the salty wind from the sea. Eventually his hand caught on something sharp, and he pulled away in surprise. There was no cut, no bleeding on his finger, but the stinging had not yet faded.
He turned his attention to the thing which had pricked him. It was a tooth, he saw, bony and white and jutting out slightly from the side of the cliff. Not just a tooth, he realized, but a whole skeleton. His eyes took in the unusual shape of the four-legged creature, whose fearsome skull bore a long horn upon its snout. The fossilized dinosaur's jaw, with its rows of sharp teeth, menaced him, and its empty eyes pulled him in. It was unlike any animal he had ever seen.
It wasn't until one of the other boys called his name from atop the cliff that he was broken out of his reverie, and then he turned and ran farther along the cliff until he found a place to climb up.
He would later regret leaving so hastily, for, although on many occasions he would roam the shore in search of it, never again could he find that strange relic. The thing took on a somewhat mythical status in his mind, as if he had stumbled upon some forbidden but all-important bit of knowledge, the ultimate answer to that small part of his life which had so far seemed inexplicable.
As he grew older, Martin began to fall behind his peers as they came to prefer hunting and fighting to boyish play. Whereas before they had spent their evenings with their mothers and sisters, now they nipped constantly at the heels of the men and older boys, who regarded them generally as a nuisance.
For some time he played at these activities himself but, without ever having had a father to guide him, his lack of skill made him self-conscious. He resented his apparent inferiority to the other boys, and after a while began to resent the boys as well.
Regardless, Martin was content enough to give up the usual pastimes of young men in favor of spending his time alone, or with his mother, who always regarded him with a sad smile whenever he declined her suggestions to do otherwise.
Before long though, one of the men of the village approached him. It wasn't fair for him to be punished for not having a father, the elders had decided, and he would need a male mentor. So the man took him under his wing, and showed him the ways of hunting, fighting, and building. Martin was quite resistant to the idea at first but, with a bit of guidance, soon found himself a skilled archer, and he could throw a spear farther and more accurately than any of the other boys. Once again, he was welcomed among his peers.
It was only around this age that he noticed the kindness the people of the village always showed him was never extended to his mother. Something he had been completely oblivious to before now became more and more obvious. The men avoided her and never spoke a word to her. The women would fall quiet and sullen whenever his mother came around, only speaking to her when she spoke first. That was, Martin noticed, increasingly less frequent.
Whenever Martin would ask his mother about this, or about where his father was, she would answer him as she always had. "He was just a man," she said, in the language they used at the time. "Not your father."
His increasing awareness of his mother's treatment marked the division between what he saw as his blissful childhood years and those of his early adulthood. It wasn't just that she was shunned and ignored. At village gatherings she would be rebuked for coming too near the communal fire, or mistakenly eating when one single other man or woman of the village had not yet had their share. Martin was ashamed that he had never noticed all of this before.
Once, a man even lashed out at her physically, striking her in the back of the head with his palm. Martin flew at him in a rage, striking him twice before his mother's shouts calmed him. There were other women in the village who didn’t have a mate, whether the man had died on a hunt or while fighting a man of another tribe. Yet those women were not treated like his mother was. Often they were held in even higher esteem among the villagers.
His confusion as to why she was treated this way, and his growing resentment of the others who did it, began to consume him. His mother still wouldn't discuss it with him, and her mournful expression whenever he asked only made him regret having done so.
And so, finally, he got his answer one day by asking another boy. Those he considered his friends had always either claimed not to know or refused to answer, so he turned to the one boy of his age whom he liked the least, one with whom he had often competed viciously on hunts. With a smirk, the boy told him the answer, what he had heard from his father. She was 'unclean', he told him.
The exact word he had used was not one Martin would later be able to easily translate to other languages, but this one was the closest. Its full meaning conveyed that of a person or thing that had been tried and discarded for being unsuitable for its purpose. A man had used his mother, and in the process Martin himself had been made. The traditions of their people dictated that they did not cast out their own, but neither could she ever be a suitable partner for a man of the village.
Rage boiled over within him as the young man told him this, his satisfied smile never wavering. Martin leapt upon him, his elbow landing heavily at the boy's ribs. They wrestled and fought on the ground in the middle of the village as others gathered around them, some encouraging the two to fight harder, and some entreating them to stop. They kept fighting until the other boy somehow got his hands on a carved bone dagger and whipped it across Martin's chest.
His skin peeled back, revealing streaks of red muscle between the white ribs. Blood began to cascade down his front, and the other boy's smile finally faltered as he dropped the blade to the ground. Martin put a hand to his wounded chest, and his head began to spin. Somewhere, nearby and yet also distant, he heard his mother screaming. And then she wasn't the only one screaming anymore. Martin looked back at his chest, which had already begun to heal.
Cartilage regrew and stretched itself across the gaps in tissue. New sheets of skin crawled forward from both sides to cover his wounds. And inside his head was a violent, thunderous chorus of sound, like millions of v
oices crying out to him at once, and his mind raced to pay each its due.
And then, moments later, Martin stood unharmed amidst a circle of confounded villagers. There was no sign upon his chest of the massive, fatal wound he had been dealt. All was quiet for another moment, and then the shouting erupted once again. There were hands clawing at his wrists and ankles, lifting him off the ground though he fought with all his strength. Feet away, men grasped at his mother in the same way and, seeing that, Martin fought even harder.
The villagers' frenzied screaming was mostly wordless, but its message was clear. Death. The two of them were carried into a clearing and bound with rope. As they restrained, him Martin freed his hands and struck at the nearest man, knocking him to the ground, but a foot planted into his gut sapped his strength once again. The men were surrounding his mother, spears in hand. He screamed, his fury erupting, and it was as though his howl shook the entire earth.
