The Footsteps of Cain

by Derek Kohlhagen

  “Samuel, wait!” Henry called to him. He was about to say something else, but at that moment Tristan began to thrash about, violently...looking to escape. Henry was suddenly distracted by trying to keep his hold on the man.

  Cameron’s back bumped against the wall of the Church, and now he was trapped. “Samuel, think about what you’re doing!” he said.

  Samuel was done talking. And he certainly didn’t want to hear any more. This man before him, who had been nothing but an obstacle. This man, who had fought him at every turn and questioned every decision he made. Now it was all clear. Cameron had been against him, against all of them, from the start.

  Only now, when it was too late, was he realizing his mistake. He’d be damned sure to make up for it.

  Samuel brought the plank up, and put his full weight behind his swing.

  The traitor had better reflexes than he expected. Cameron dropped his head at the last second, and Samuel’s blow went whistling, harmlessly, above his head. The plank scraped against the wall, and splinters went flying.

  Samuel was dismayed to find that he’d put too much into the attack; he struggled to recover the weight of the plank back into a readied position.

  Cameron took advantage of his momentary impairment. Yet, even though he had an obvious physical advantage, he abandoned the fight and chose escape, instead. He twisted away, and fled.

  Cameron’s long legs gave him the advantage over Samuel in terms of stride, but Samuel himself was anything but slow. The heavy plank he was holding, however, would definitely make the pursuit more difficult, and so he found he had to make a split-second decision. Did he hold on to his crude weapon, maintaining the upper hand if it came to a fight, but risk Cameron outrunning him? Or, did he even the chances of catching the lumbering technician, but sacrifice his combat leverage?

  “Damn it,” Samuel swore, and made his decision. The plank kicked up dust as it hit the ground. There was no point in keeping it if Cameron got away.

  He would be leaving Henry behind, who was still struggling with Tristan and calling after him. But still, he trusted Henry to come through for him, and drag the insane prophet off to his incarceration.

  And so, Samuel sped off. His body was aching from his exertions; his knees complained and he felt every pulse of blood through his developing bruises, but his focus on his quarry shoved it all to the back of his mind. He had no idea what he would do when...if...he caught up with Cameron; he’d just have to improvise. He was playing a dangerous game, he knew...but the traitor had to pay for what he had done, and for the lives he had taken, today.

  One of the many watch towers that were set into the exterior wall loomed over the Church like a silent sentinel, a useless cannon sitting atop it. Cameron was making a bee-line for the base of the tower, toward an access hatch. Catching him inside was going to be much trickier than out in the open, Samuel knew, and he clenched his teeth at the prospect.

  Cameron skidded to a halt beside the hatch, grasped the handle, and wrenched it open. He disappeared through the door, into the darkness, and slammed the hatch shut behind him.

  Samuel was twenty feet away. Ten.

  He reached the hatch, afraid that Cameron had engaged the locking bar on the inside that would prevent him from following. The big man’s attention must have been focused on speed; thankfully, the hatch swung open without difficulty when he pulled on the handle.

  Inside, he could see only shadows. Samuel wasn’t stupid...he wasn’t about to go plunging headlong into the relative darkness of the interior and make himself vulnerable to any trap that his prey had set for him. He put his back against the wall, next to the hatch, and strained with his ears to get any clues to Cameron’s whereabouts.

  There, above him. Boots ringing against metal stairs. Cameron had gone up.

  Samuel ducked inside, where the artificial light was limited, just as it was everywhere at the facility. Hallways opened to his right and left. If he were to pick one direction and head that way, he’d end up back where he started, after a long walk.

  In the center of the shadowy room was a staircase with switchbacks and slatted steps, leading up into the ceiling. He took a few quick steps over to the stairs, and peered up.

  There was a hulking, black silhouette above him, taking the steps two at a time and breathing heavily.

  Samuel swung himself over the rail, and continued his pursuit upward. The aches in his body made it an arduous climb, but he stubbornly maintained his speed. One after another the levels of the tower fell below him. He paused at each floor junction, to make sure he didn’t pass Cameron up in case the man had decided to abandon the stairs and flee down one of the curving hallways. Each time he stopped, he heard more footfalls on the stairs overhead.

  Cameron didn’t appear to be altering his route. Samuel continued up after him.

  When he finally came to the base of the stairs on the third floor, the final one before the top of the wall, he was met with an ominous silence.

  The footsteps, above him, had ceased.

  He craned his neck back and forth, trying to get an idea of what waited for him on the landing above. The stairs ended at a wide opening surrounded by a railing. He would be completely exposed, if he went up.

  There was no sign of the large man, at least not from his current vantage point. His senses were screaming danger at him, and everything his body was telling him made him want to go back down and find another way up, another option that would even the odds.

  Still...any other route Samuel took would give Cameron the time he needed to slip away. No, he hadn’t come this far only to turn back. He discarded every defensive impulse he had and made his way up, very slowly, his body tensing more with each step he took. His eyes swiveled around the border of the opening, searching...starved of proper light. His head broke the plane of the floor.

  Despite his every effort to foresee all possibilities, every angle that he thought he’d covered with his paranoia, he still didn’t see it coming.

  An imposing shadow came at him out of the darkness, leaping over the railing behind him and coming down on him, full-force. Cameron’s weight crushed him from above, and his body was pushed down onto the incline of the stairs. Samuel’s head cracked against the edge of the top step, and pain exploded over his brow. All at once there was warm fluid running down over and into his right eye; he furiously tried to blink it away, by reflex, while at the same time he raged against the weight pinning him down. A fist pummeled into the vulnerable flesh of his side, and he howled in pain.

  Large hands, hands that he was coming to understand that he’d woefully underestimated, seized him by the back of his collar, and then all at once he was being hauled up the steps like a child, his feet banging against the harsh metal until he was sent sprawling on the floor of the tower’s top chamber. Cool evening air wafted through both exits.

  As he struggled, he looked out with his good eye and saw the top floor of the wall through the doors, open to the sky and flanked by more waist-high railings.

  Cameron’s voice fell upon him with poison.

  “You won’t…listen! You never...listen!”

  Again he was pulled along, this time out of the exit to his right and into the open. Samuel saw the expanse of the Dome beyond the courtyard and the shanties, still sputtering smoke. He looked down through the side railing, and beheld the lethal drop to the ground.

  Cameron lifted him up and turned him around so that they were facing one another. Samuel saw fury dancing in his eyes, spittle on his chin.

  “Years of this! I try to tell you something...try to tell you what you’re doing wrong...but you just can’t get it through your...thick...skull!”

  Cameron jerked a knee up and caught Samuel in the navel, doubling him over. All the air left his lungs in a rush, and to his chagrin didn’t seem interested in returning. He fought his spasming diaphragm, desperate for oxygen. Blobs of color spotted his vision.

  “What about now? Can you hear me now? Is this what it
takes?”

  Cameron’s fist crashed down against his cheek, and once again he was thrown to the floor. The world was rolling, out of control, and inside his bubble of pain he was struck by the insanity of the moment. He was outraged by it and dismayed by it...dismayed by the burning Dome and the people whose lives had been taken. They, the people of the Spire, had been struggling to survive for so many years, in a place where so much seemed to be dead or dying. They had fought to live for so long, through so much; they had been brought up to order from the roiling chaos they had once succumbed to, and still they couldn’t all find a way to move the boulder of their future in the same direction. Still there were a select, significant few who couldn’t hear Gorman’s message of unity, so mired were they in their own misplaced assurances and perverted ideals, and who so tragically held the power to affect so many.

  Cameron’s heavy boots clomped closer.

  Samuel gritted his teeth. They didn’t stand a chance if they suffered the will of madmen. There could be no concession, no quarter given. Exile was too good for ruined humans such as these.

  He tensed his bleeding body, pulling his knees up and pushing himself off the ground. He rolled his head over so his good eye was up. Cameron was almost upon him.

  Only one of them would leave the wall alive. This was clear. Only one of their ideals could survive.

  Cameron brought a foot back to send a boot into Samuel’s exposed ribs, but this time, Samuel was ready. The instant the bigger man’s weight settled onto one leg, Samuel struck. He clasped both hands together like a wrecking ball, and spun, driving both fists into the inside of the traitor’s planted knee. He gave it everything he could.

  Cameron’s leg gave immediately and bowed outward, and Samuel was satisfied to hear something snap. Cameron screamed and fell against the outside railing, clutching and grabbing at it to maintain his footing. His left leg was no longer supporting him; it now jutted inward in an unnatural angle, and his eyes were wild with agony.

  Samuel struggled against his nausea, his disorientation, and used the opposite rail to get to his feet. He drew his sleeve across his face to wipe away some of the blood, and got his vision to clear, somewhat. The iron tangle his gut had become from Cameron’s knee had softened and unraveled a bit, and his breathing was mercifully coming easier.

  “Cameron,” he rasped, “you never deserved to live here. You’re fucking incompatible. You keep trying to mold this place into something that you can accept, but you’ve got it backward. It’s the Spire that won’t accept you. And to think, there was a time that I thought you could help us. But no...you had someone else to help, didn’t you? Besides yourself, I mean.”

  Cameron bared his teeth at Samuel, and crouched down on his good leg like a predator looking to spring.

  “You always had your own ideas. It’s too bad you were always at the center of them.”

  Just as Samuel had expected, Cameron launched himself forward. It was a powerful lunge, but it was also an unstable one. Everything about his attack revealed it as a last-ditch effort...there was no way to recover from the momentum he generated, not on only a single functional leg. The man must have been either too enraged or too desperate, or both, to think rationally about his choice.

  Samuel slumped down reflexively, and drove his shoulder under Cameron’s bulk to assist its trajectory. And so, instead of taking Samuel over the railing as he had no doubt intended, Cameron found himself sailing over it alone instead, out into the cool evening air, sixty feet up from the ground. He seemed to hang there a moment, flailing his limbs absurdly.

  And then, gravity remembered itself and he fell with a shriek, down and down with exponential velocity. The burly man bellowed all the way to the ground, with a single breath. He didn’t have time for another.

  Samuel heard the heavy impact of Cameron’s body with the dirt below, even perched up high where he was. If he’d kicked a large sack of flour off the edge, it would have made the same sound.

  Then, finally, the evening air was quiet...muted in the presence of ever-thirsty death as she was, if only temporarily, satiated.

  Samuel’s head swam, and then he barely had time to understand that he was passing out before the darkness took him.

  * * *

  Chapter 12 – ???

  The immortal stood at the top of a hill, one sizable enough to allow him to survey his surroundings for miles. The morning sun was to his back, extending warmth that he could not feel, equalized as it was by the chill in his blood. He looked back, along the path he had traveled, and was disturbed by what he saw and by the implications that it held for him.

  More fissures had appeared. Never in front of him...always behind. The landscape to the west was now so pock-marked with them that it had become impassable, even if he had wanted to retrace his steps. Each one was the same; a tremendous hole in the earth, stretching down into what seemed to be a stark white infinity. When viewed together, they formed a colossal band the breadth of which he could not guess, for it ran on and faded beyond the horizon in both directions, perpendicular to his route.

  He felt like he was being herded toward something, urged on by the impassable presence of the multiplying, enigmatic chasms.

  The voice had been silent on the matter, amazingly. By now he was certain that he could feel its anxiety...something that he had never before suspected was possible. Through their entire journey together, the voice had almost always maintained its unaffected, insensitive...almost apathetic tone, breaking occasionally into glee when he was made to suffer. But now, there was an urgency and a moodiness that had never been there before. It made him nervous, in a world that he hadn’t believed could hold any further threat for him.

  OH, SHUT UP. ALL THIS DAMNED INTROSPECTION IS DRIVING ME CRAZY. I CAN SEE NOW THAT I SHOULD HAVE GIVEN YOU SOMETHING TO KEEP YOU BUSY... LIKE A RUBIK’S CUBE OR SOMETHING...TO KEEP YOU FROM SOAKING SO MUCH IN YOUR OWN MELODRAMA. YEAH, A RUBIK’S CUBE WOULD HAVE KEPT YOU BUSY, TOO...EVEN FOR TWENTY-THOUSAND YEARS. LOTS OF PEOPLE HAVE CLAIMED THAT THEY’VE SOLVED THAT LITTLE SON OF A BITCH, BUT LET ME TELL YOU FROM EXPERIENCE...IT’S FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE.

  Then, he noticed something else. As the sunlight of the young day reached its tendrils farther west, the lightening sky into which it crept appeared...incomplete. Patchy. He didn’t notice it at first, for the white spots could have easily been mistaken for clouds, but now he was certain that they weren’t. They didn’t obscure a gray sky behind them as clouds did; no, they were more like an absence of sky...holes in the heavens just as there were holes in the earth. It was like the world was being eaten up, bite by bite, by a swarm of...something...that he could not see. In all of his prolonged passage across the planet, he had never seen the likes of it.

  I SAID, DON’T WORRY ABOUT IT. AND STOP WASTING TIME. REMEMBER WHY YOU’RE DOING THIS. I DON’T WANT TO HAVE TO HURT HER AGAIN.

  Why? Why can’t you tell me what is happening? Why is it such a secret?

  IT JUST IS, OKAY?! IT’S NOT FOR YOU TO KNOW...OUTSIDE OF YOUR, SHALL WE SAY, CIRCLE OF PRACTICAL RELEVANCE! NOW, ARE YOU GOING TO GET GOING OR AM I GOING TO FIRE UP THE BARBECUE AND MAKE ME SOME LENA BURGERS?

  Again, there was the nervousness...the uncertainty. The voice was pushing too hard, and there was a little too much false bravado in its tone. For the first time, in all of their thousands of years together, he wondered...could there be something that the voice, seemingly a spirit of immense power and knowledge, was afraid of?

  What was more...could he use that fear to his advantage?

  OH, THAT JUST PISSES ME OFF. YOU WANT ME TO TORCH HER AGAIN? FINE...HERE WE GO—

  I’m tired.

  WHAT?

  I’m tired. I’ve been forced to live far longer than anyone is supposed to, pushed past my limits again and again. I’ve circled the world an uncountable number of times, depleted myself over and over again to do this thing you’ve demanded of me. And I’m tired. I want this to be over, down deep into every crack of me. I thought I’d reac
hed my limit ten-thousand years ago, but I pressed on because I knew you had her, and knew that you’d happily torture her until you got your way. Even though I’d forgotten most of who she was...even though she became something more like an idea to me than anyone who’d actually lived and breathed. But you knew that I still loved her...would still love her, even as a shapeless figment in my head.

  I SWEAR, IF YOU DON’T GET MOVING—

  But I don’t think I can do it. I don’t think I want to, anymore, and I think I know how to end it.

  WHAT...THE...FUCK...ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?

  I’m talking about heading back the way I’ve come, and finding out what’s at the bottom of one of those holes.

  The voice snorted. Again, there was a veneer of superiority...but behind it, a note of wariness.

  COME ON. YOU’D THROW EVERYTHING AWAY, AFTER ALL THIS TIME, AFTER ALL THE MILES YOU’VE TRAVELED AND THE PROGRESS YOU’VE MADE. YOU’D HAVE ME TOSS HER INTO THE FIRES, FOR FUCKING EVER, JUST TO GET OUT OF THIS ONE LITTLE CHORE I’VE ASSIGNED YOU.

  You’re scared of what’s happening. You’re afraid of those things out there. You, who isn’t afraid of anything. You, who’ve told me so many times that your power is absolute. You’re losing control. I can feel it.

  He broke into a stride, making his way back down the hill he’d climbed.

  NO! WAIT! FOR FUCK’S SAKE, WE DON’T HAVE TIME FOR THIS!

  He continued, following his own backward footprints, each step taking him closer to the—what...erosion of reality?—before him. He kept expecting the spirit to stoke the fires beneath Lena’s tree...noting that it hadn’t yet, in spite of all its threats.

  OH, I’LL DO IT, ALRIGHT! I’LL BURN HER UNTIL HER FLESH COOKS AND SPLITS! I DON’T CARE!

  I don’t think so. I don’t think you will. And even if you did, I won’t be around much longer, anyway. Once I’m gone, once you don’t have my suffering as your own entertainment, there won’t be a reason for you to make her suffer. It seems to me that you’ve got other things you’d rather be doing than tormenting the love of a man who isn’t there to be affected by it. Seems like you’d get pretty bored after a while.