The Footsteps of Cain

by Derek Kohlhagen

  In another man, with other intentions, these qualities would have made a champion. A savior. Samuel was convinced that they only made this particular man more dangerous.

  The Church of the Reclamation stood inside the northern outer wall, thrown together like so many other dwellings with scraps of metal and discarded material. Tristan Englewood was its keeper. He founded the church years ago; his first sermons were delivered among the habmods themselves to smaller groups, until his fervent passion had drawn enough followers to warrant a centralized location where his newly founded religion could incubate.

  “Do you not feel the emptiness? It lies within us all. We all feel the cold worms of it squirming around inside. From birth we feel it. We are incomplete! Partial! There is a whole fragment of our true being that we have been deprived of! And there is but one way to become whole, and that is to leave the illusion of this world behind! This place is but a mockery, a place of limited dimension!”

  As Samuel stood there, listening with his lip curled, a man near him suddenly was seized by a violent coughing spell. His body twisted and spasmed violently, and he was forced to bury his mouth in the sleeve of his tunic to muffle the sound. As Tristan went on, the man hacked for a full thirty seconds or so before he regained control of himself.

  Samuel narrowed his eyes, thoughtfully. Now that he was paying attention to it, he discovered that there were others in the crowd who were sniffling and coughing as well. Quite a few of them, in fact.

  It gave Samuel the chills. He knew what it meant.

  “Lay down your troubles, people!” Tristan preached on. “They will have no place in the next world! The Reclamation is upon us! We have already seen it working among us, plucking us away as a hand would from a ripened vine! You wake each day, and where is your brother? Where is your mother? Your father? Where is your child?”

  At this, Samuel could hear a few members of the crowd choke with emotion, and begin to openly weep. Tristan turned his face in their direction.

  “Yes, it is painful. Yes, it feels cruel. But think of where they have gone! Do not grieve for them, for they are safely in the embrace of the What Comes After! They were the purest of us, the most stalwart in their belief, and that has ensured their transcendence! Learn from them, for only after we have absorbed the lesson can we join them in that velvet embrace!”

  Another coughing fit wracked the man next to him. He produced a rag from a pocket and wiped it across his mouth. Samuel could see flecks of blood on the cloth.

  “But even if you are not chosen to transcend, take into your heart the comfort that the Reclaimer is coming to liberate the remaining faithful! He comes for each of us, to draw us into the folds of eternity, where all hunger and pestilence, all need and suffering are destroyed! Believe, dear friends! Believe with me and we will walk that beautiful place together, and our pleasures and peace will know nothing of limitation!”

  Tristan paused dramatically and scanned the crowd, making eye contact with each member of his audience. When his eyes met Samuel’s, they narrowed and he lingered. His voice dropped in volume.

  “There are those among us who lack the...enlightenment...to surrender their false idols,” he continued. “Not all minds will be freed of their tragic heresy. It is these disbelievers that are the real enemy, for they would dare to place themselves between you...and your salvation.”

  His eyes broke away from Samuel’s, and he raised his arms toward the skies and rolled his head back in the ecstasy of the moment.

  “They will not stop, cannot stop the will of the truly devout! It is as strong as the mountains and enduring as tempered steel! Bathe with me, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters...bathe with me in the radiance of our resolve!”

  A cheer erupted from the limp-jawed crowd. Samuel could hear the words of those who stood close to him, proclaiming their submission to the so-called Message and praising its messenger.

  “Now, go back to your homes, and stay vigilant!” Tristan implored them, finishing his sermon. “Watch the skies! When the darkness blots out the sun, you will know the time is nigh!”

  Tristan’s last statement caught Samuel off guard. He shivered, and felt the blood drain from his face.

  Occasionally Tristan would make the reference about the coming darkness, and every time Samuel heard it, it turned his gut to water. Hearing it spoken aloud sent him back to a different place, somewhere far away and long ago, when he’d been broken and his courage had been ground into powder.

  He wanted so desperately to discount everything that Tristan preached...dismiss it as the crazy rantings of a disturbed mind.

  Yet, he’d stood under such a sky. He himself had seen the darkness firsthand, and the monster that came with it.

  He’d survived it...somehow. He’d lived on to have it haunt his dreams, as it had again that very morning. There was only one person he’d ever told about it, and that’s where it would stop. If anyone else knew of the burden he carried, it would lend Tristan Englewood validation and convince even more of his authenticity. Samuel couldn’t have that on his conscience.

  He didn’t know how the priest could have knowledge of the monster. He’d almost convinced himself that it never happened. But, with Tristan speaking his nightmares aloud, he was forced to face one of two things:

  The first was that, even as the thought sickened him, Tristan just might harbor some knowledge of the very thing that Samuel had yearned so long to understand, ever since he was a boy, back on the fateful day.

  The second, that they were both insane.

  Neither possibility was very appealing, and so he’d never actually approached the priest with his questions, instead choosing the comforting embrace of ignorance and denial. He couldn’t face a world where he had anything in common with such a deranged individual, and would always condemn Tristan for his twisted methodology and his cultist, brain-washing tactics. His church was a blight among the people, and Samuel longed for the day that would see him put outside the walls, for good.

  Although it had stood for years, now, Tristan’s Church of the Reclamation hadn’t drawn a truly sizable following until the last several months or so. Samuel attributed this to a purposeful lack of spiritual guidance from the Council, paired with a rising desperation in the hearts of the people. It occurred to Samuel that the increased patronage of the church should have been predicted. In terrible times, there is one question that is always foremost in the minds of the wretched:

  Why is this happening to us?

  It is that single, powerful question that forces those asking it to reach outside of themselves, past the ignorance of their kin, and into the ether where gods live and breathe, where comfort and explanation are plentiful to the indigent and the desperate. No, Samuel was not surprised that the people flocked to Tristan so readily, now. The real mystery, he supposed, was why more did not.

  Between the daily struggle to survive...the hardship....

  The disappearances.

  The recent, unexplained vanishings had attracted many to Tristan’s pulpit, and he had used them to the fullest, like a magnet, drawing people into the fold and using their fear as a means of subversion.

  It had been going on for the past few months, now. At first, they’d postulated that people were simply leaving the Spire...wandering off into the Wastes for whatever unthinkable reason. Search parties were sent out, always returning with the same result: There was no sign of the missing populace, and furthermore, there was no physical evidence that they had even left the facility in the first place...not one footprint, tire track, or camp site was ever found within the generous radius of their search.

  Then, the number of reports rose. Men, women, and children simply vanishing with nothing to inform of their whereabouts. Accounts of people stepping out of habmods for only a moment, or waking in the morning, only to return to find loved ones whisked away. They left behind crumples of clothing on the floor, bed, or chair that they had worn just moments before. Spilled water from dropped cups,
abandoned seemingly in mid-air. Scattered tools, a sudden end to a trail of footprints in the dirt...it was like the universe was realizing that it was a mistake that these people existed at all, and had come to right the wrong one by one.

  As more investigation went into the unsettling disappearances, a pattern began to emerge. It had been learned that, prior to going missing, the victims had been complaining of flu-like symptoms: Pounding headaches, coughing, raging fevers...nosebleeds. Then, one day, they would be erased from the face of the world, leaving the ones who remained completely at a loss.

  And so, Tristan had pounced on the opportunity to use the mystery as more fuel for his ideological fire. For him, everything pointed to the eventuality of his “Reclamation”...the idea that the world had come to collect on humanity’s debt, a deficit sown from mankind’s wickedness. He offered an explanation for the unexplainable, a charlatan dispensing his convenient truth to those grasping for it, for anything. Samuel of course didn’t think that offering comfort and assurance was by any means a bad thing, but there was something in Tristan’s message...something in his eyes that could be only barely seen, just beyond the base of his pupils, that seemed to lay in wait for some sinister purpose. Something unwholesome. Something...malicious.

  Samuel shook off his dark thoughts and moved on, away from the crowd. He had swallowed enough of Tristan’s poison for one day and wished not to be soiled by any more of it. He had a job to do, something that would contribute to the lives of the people tangibly...not deprive them of their reason and give them false hope.

  He finally arrived at the sturdy metal fence that ran tightly against the circumference of the Dome’s base, just high enough to block the view of anyone outside. Samuel unlatched the gate, and made his way into the interior of the Dome’s compound. He reached a door set into the incline of the wall...a service entrance...and pulled it open. Stepping through, he was immediately surrounded by the calming, steady hum of the building’s distant internal machinery. In his mind, he noticed how curiously similar the sound was to the one he’d heard from the crowd when he exited his living quarters not long ago. It was comforting to him, to pretend that machines might converse the way that people do. At least in his mind, that made them seem a little less cold.

  The corridor in front of him was dimly lit, so again it took his eyes a bit to adjust. Fluorescent lights were snugly set into the corners where the walls met the ceiling, and provided just enough light to let one see the corridor walls and grated floors. Samuel didn’t have to go too far before he came to a large, reinforced pair of doors that marked the entrance to the service elevator. He swatted the button with a knuckle and was mildly surprised to see the doors immediately slide open, announcing the elevator’s presence, already at the ground floor.

  He entered the small, claustrophobia-inducing crate and pressed another button on the elevator’s keypad that would take him down to sub-level three. There was a sudden, nauseating lurch, and a lightness to his body that informed him of his rapid decent into the earth. The dim lights of the elevator’s interior flickered here and there, and his mind half-seriously conjured what it might be like to be trapped in the metal box, alone, in the dark.

  Power consumption was extremely frugal at the Spire. It was a condition that the people had come to accept, for it had been that way for as long as anyone could remember. Another of the great mysteries of the facility was that only a fraction of the generators that supplied power actually functioned. There was nothing to indicate that the deactivated generators were damaged in any way; they just sat there, switched off and useless. From what they understood, the computers compensated for this lack of power by strictly regulating the remaining, meager amount to each need, which explained why anything that required power only sipped at the generators that were active, why the lights were so dim, and why core, life-sustaining systems were somewhat functional, while peripheral ones not at all.

  What little Samuel and his team had gathered seemed to indicate that, at some unknown point in the past, some unknown, catastrophic event had occurred that forced the computers to shut down most of the generators. Although most of their responsibilities concerned the ordinary, everyday function of the Spire, any and every extra scrap of time they had targeted the lack of power, and figuring out exactly how to restore the dormant generators to full operation. It was a task that they had worked on for years. The sad fact was that the progress they had made in solving the riddle was, to put it kindly, disappointing. Samuel himself called it pathetic.

  Also disappointing was the fact that Samuel and his team were the most technically proficient people at the Spire, and yet still knew so little about how the facility actually worked. Most of the working knowledge of its operational details had perished in the dark age of anarchy that had reigned before his time there, when the people who’d come before him had let go of rationality and seized survivalism with both hands, turning on one another and allowing civilization to sink into the tar pit of their more primal impulses.

  What little they knew, they’d figured out through years of trial and error (a lot of error), and yet even though they had learned so much about the internal systems, they were still no closer to activating the silent generators. They were armed with little knowledge against amazingly complex systems that had been put in place hundreds of years before they were born. Sometimes their endeavors felt like being dropped into a dark room, and being asked to assemble an unknown object with a vast amount of parts, all the while not knowing which ones were actually needed and which ones were superfluous. It was enough to drive anyone insane, yet somehow they kept pushing ahead, despite how few and far between the rewards had been.

  Power was everything. It meant bountiful food and clean water, which were sorely needed by the people. Most were malnourished and dehydrated, because, while the hydroponic farms and water filtering systems were functional, they were nowhere near meeting the needs of so many. All their problems had the same bottom line: Power was everything. The truth of the matter was that the population was barely breaking even on the basic essentials.

  Samuel felt his feet being pressed into the floor, as the elevator began to slow on its descent to sub-level three. There was a shudder, and the doors opened.

  That was when he heard the screaming.

  * * *

  Chapter 3 – Samuel

  An icy grip squeezed his heart. It was a woman’s scream, to be sure, close and clear enough that he was convinced it came from somewhere on the same sub-level. Fueled by a sudden rush of adrenaline, he dashed out of the elevator and into the hallway, turning toward the source of the chilling sound. He worked his legs up to a sprint, and strained his eyes against the inadequate lighting to spy the source. Eventually, familiar shapes of people sprouted out of the darkness, and he surveyed the scene before him.

  Kelly Prince was standing outside the door to the server room, her face bloodless. She was stammering something to a tall, muscular man who had gently taken her shoulders in his blocky hands, trying to comfort her. The back of Henry Goodwin’s bald head was bobbing while he softly spoke to her, his soothing baritone slowing the bucking frenzy of her soprano.

  Henry was another of Samuel’s technicians, a man of good nature and joviality, much to Samuel’s continued amazement. He was solid in body and mood, mostly unshaken by the turbulent tides of ill-fortune, and Samuel was often envious of his ever-buoyant spirit. If ever there was one to calm frayed nerves, it was Henry, but even he was struggling to alleviate Kelly’s distress.

  “It’s alright, Kelly...just calm down,” he was saying. “I’m sure he’s around here somewhere. Let’s just look around and see—”

  “He’s not...he’s NOT!” Kelly stammered back. “Look for yourself! He’s gone! Like all the others!”

  “What’s going on?” panted Samuel as he came to a stop beside them. They both turned to regard him. They were both dressed similar to himself; gray coveralls and thick boots. Lived-in clothing.

  K
elly started to say something, but then choked on the words and put her face in her hands. Henry glanced at her in concern, and then spoke for her.

  “She can’t find George. She said he’s gone.”

  Samuel’s stomach dropped.

  “Gone, like...?” he prompted.

  Kelly looked at him, her eyes full of ghosts.

  “Like the others. Like all the rest. Go in...you’ll see.” Her head dropped again.

  Samuel shared a look of unease with Henry, who gave him a little shrug of helplessness. Samuel grimly set his face, and took a few hesitant steps to the server room door. Reaching out, he took the door handle and pushed his way through.

  The hum of machinery rose sharply in volume as Samuel entered the corner of the cavernous room, illuminated dimly from the sparse fluorescence above. Long rows of server stacks filled the space, their black towers adorned with blinking blue and green lights. How they continued to function, Samuel had no idea. They were old...possibly as old as the facility itself. Yet, unlike the other machines in the Spire that all seemed to be slowly crapping out, these computers ran and ran with no sign of trouble. Samuel wished he could take comfort from anything that seemed to function so well in the middle of such impending breakdown, but the stoic, business-like perseverance of the servers only made them seem more unworldly by comparison.

  Samuel understood gears and engines. He knew nothing of the innards of these dark, foreboding stacks, nor how they worked their magic. To him, they represented the proverbial black box in a very literal fashion; he knew they accepted commands from the computer terminals somehow through the wires that littered the floor, and that they could perform calculations and control mechanical systems, but he had no real idea how. The expertise had been lost, along with its cousins, in the dark times that had come before. Now, no one was willing to tamper with the internal workings of the machines, for fear they would inadvertently sabotage them beyond repair. For much of the same reason, interactions with the computer terminals had tapered as well. These days, the server room was cloaked in a kind of mysticism that the people were forced to place their faith in, even as it frightened them.