A child...a boy, perhaps five or six years old...was crumpled in a fetal position, whimpering into hands that covered his face. Every square inch of him was a matted, filthy mess, and he was dressed in a shirt and pants that were much too large for his small frame, clothing whose original color had long since faded into a uniform gray-brown. His hair was long and unkempt, and by the look of his emaciated body, he had gone far too long without food.
The boy slowly lifted his head at Ejelano’s approach and his hands fell away, his gaunt face curious. He searched Ejelano with his eyes. If he was frightened, he didn’t show it; Ejelano wondered if he was naturally brave, or simply too weak to be afraid.
Surprisingly, the boy looked...hopeful.
“Hello,” he said.
His voice was every bit as small as the rest of him. He had said it as many children say things...unburdened by pasts or futures, only contextual to the moment in which the words are spoken in their unaffected, innocent way. The music of his words clashed sharply with the shabby surroundings, and momentarily Ejelano felt an uncharacteristic compulsion to stop the boy from speaking further, to save him, lest he summon the life-quenching phantom of the Wastes with his purity.
“Do you have any food? I’m hungry.”
Ejelano didn’t want to answer. He didn’t want to treat the child as a human being, because cattle are much easier to dispatch. There would be no avoiding what he had come to do, not if he was going to continue forward. He had braced himself against compassion for so long that emotionlessness had become an automatic state for him. But still, in the heart of the ruined house, and faced so personally with something as compelling as a hungry child asking for food, the prickles of pity were unmistakable.
Something stirred in him, something in the deepest parts of himself, where the shreds of his humanity were imprisoned and constricted. He tried to keep the sentiment out, but even as he battled it he felt cracks spreading through his detachment. A warmth leaked in, pooling over him even as he strove to remain cold, and then, against one half of his will but fueled by the other, he heard himself respond.
“No...no, I have no food.”
The poor man’s hope that had touched the boy’s face vanished.
“Okay,” he said, dejected. He struggled up to a sitting position, resting his back against the wall. It took him much too long to complete the maneuver. “I’m Brady. What’s your name?”
Again, Ejelano felt the urge to answer. At the same time, he badly wanted to be anywhere else, away from that place.
“Ejelano,” he replied, stonily.
“That’s a funny name. It’s long. It’s got....”
He squinted his eyes in thought.
“Four beats. Mine’s short; it only has two.” He held up one finger, and then the other as he said his name, emphasizing the syllables. “Bray...Dee. See?”
Ejelano nodded.
“I’m good at words. I know a lot of them. My Dad taught me.”
There was an awkward pause, although by Brady’s open, earnest expression Ejelano could see that it was only awkward for himself.
“What are you doing here?” the boy asked.
“I was...passing by.”
“Where are you going?”
To choke the life out of what is left of the human race. To rend and tear and burn.
“To finish...something I started,” he said out loud.
Brady nodded, accepting the answer, displaying a possession of another characteristic that all children have—asking too much about the little things, and too little about the big things.
“Your voice sounds...different. Different than mine, I mean.”
“I’m from...far away. Not from here.”
Brady smiled.
“I like it. I like how it sounds.” The boy looked over at the bed with the two bodies. “There’s nobody around to talk to, anymore. I miss it. I’m so tired all the time, now...like they are. They’ve been sleeping for a long time. I try to stay asleep, too, because when I sleep I don’t think about food. Except when I dream, though. But I don’t remember my dreams very much.”
The boy sniffed, and wiped his nose on his grimy sleeve.
“I wish they would wake up,” he said, his voice even smaller.
Ejelano bowed his head.
“I don’t...eat,” he said. “Or sleep. So, I guess I don’t dream, either.”
Brady looked at him sideways, skeptical. Then he smiled again.
“You’re playing a game with me.”
“No, I’m not. It’s true.”
“Why? Why don’t you sleep?”
“I just don’t need to,” Ejelano said, shrugging.
Brady frowned, and his eyes drifted down to Ejelano’s chest, where the white light glowed.
“What happened? Why do you look like that?”
“I did something...bad. A long time ago. Now...there’s a hole in me.”
It was Brady’s turn to shrug. “I used to do bad things, sometimes,” he said. “That would make Mom and Dad mad at me. Now, I’m too tired to do much of anything.”
“I think I know what you mean.”
“I wasn’t bad all the time, though! Most of the time, I was nice. I helped.” Brady looked up at him, then, suddenly. “Do you have a mom, and a dad?”
Ejelano wasn’t prepared for the bluntness of the question, and so when he replied, he tripped on his words.
“I...no...I mean, not anymore.” He gestured to the bed. “I guess they’re sleeping...like yours. For a long time, now.”
Brady looked over at the bodies, and then back at him.
“Are you sad, too?”
His protective shield...his reluctance to feel...faltered. Ejelano didn’t know exactly what did it, whether it was the scattered memories of his own mother and father, or the sincere way that Brady had asked him the strikingly poignant question with such child-like simplicity, or both things at once. Ejelano certainly had no recollection of the last time his own tears had fallen, but suddenly, as he beheld the tragedy of the child propped up against the wall before him, they were. Ejelano wept, and when he did, he wept for them both. He moved closer to the boy, and knelt down so that they were only a couple feet apart.
“Yes,” he said, answering the boy’s question.
He sat at Brady’s side, leaned back against the same wall the child did. Reaching over, Ejelano took the boy in his arms and held him close, cradling the young one’s head against his chest. The tiny shudders of Brady’s body told him that the boy shared his grief. They sat huddling there for a while, drawing comfort from one another like water from an oasis spring. Ejelano rocked side to side in a very latent, human way, and in that fleeting eye-blink of a moment...he wasn’t the monster.
YOU’RE ONLY MAKING THIS HARDER ON YOURSELF, YOU KNOW.
The voice came in and struck at the moment, crumbling it to dust. Ejelano lost everything he had gained, all the comfort from his momentary return to humanity that the child had given him. His stomach dropped to the center of the earth, and his tears flowed freer, now that he was reminded how the scene was supposed to play out.
Not this one. I can’t.
YOU’LL HAVE TO FIGURE IT OUT. COME ON, MAN...YOU KNEW WHAT HAD TO HAPPEN WHEN YOU WALKED IN THE DOOR. THE RULES ARE STILL FULL IN EFFECT.
He’s done nothing! Please...his hunger has almost taken him. Surely I don’t need to—
RULES ARE RULES. YOU DON’T GET TO LEAVE ANYONE BEHIND.
Ejelano felt anguish like he hadn’t felt since before he’d entered into his great numbness, thousands of years before. He’d come to hope that the true, human side of him had been stamped out, but now that it had been reawakened he knew that it had only been compressed down to a singularity speck, shoved to the side, and piled upon with years of scar tissue. Sitting there in that dilapidated house, with the child in his arms, he now felt his nerve endings fully exposed and singing their dirges, their gut-ripping sonata, and he lamented for himself and the world anew.
HUH. NOT SO NUMB AFTER ALL, I GUESS.
I’ll do it when I’m ready. Not before.
OH SURE. TAKE YOUR TIME. I DO, HOWEVER, FEEL THE NEED TO REMIND YOU OF THE ALL-EATING EXPANSE OF WHITE HORROR THAT IS CHASING US. BUT YEAH, WHENEVER YOU GET AROUND TO IT.
The roiling sarcasm was back. But even so submerged in his pain and guilt, Ejelano had to admit, the voice was right. It had assured him that the White would not relent, and Ejelano believed it to be the truth.
Time was short.
He heaved a great, shuddering sigh. The twin rivers of his tears moistened the topmost strands of the boy’s hair. The small body that leaned against him nestled close.
“I am glad to have met you, Brady.”
He held the child’s body securely. It hardly took any force to do so; a lack of food had rendered Brady utterly helpless, and even if that were not the case, there would be no possibility of resisting Ejelano’s unearthly strength.
“I can help you,” he sobbed. “I can help you sleep.”
He wrapped one of his meaty hands around Brady’s face, over his nose and mouth, and he squeezed. At first the trusting boy accepted it, but as the seconds went by and Ejelano didn’t release him, his air grew short and his body involuntarily struggled in vain against the immortal’s vice-like arms. Brady started to make muffled sounds in his throat...small, choking sounds.
Ejelano’s heart broke, again. His body shook with his grief, and he closed his eyes.
“Shh...it’s okay...it’s almost over...almost over....” he whispered.
It didn’t take much longer. Eventually, Brady ceased his struggles and murmurings, and his body slumped against Ejelano’s as the life left his small form. Ejelano stood, and carried his body over to the bed, where his mother and father slept, and laid him down between them.
Ejelano stood back and looked at the three of them, let his eyes linger for the last time on the tiny body in the middle and he wondered; in another world, in another far less cruel circumstance, what kind of life would the boy have led? What kind of life would any of them...the ones he’d ended?
Having finished his task, and with the echoes of lost potential pervading his head, he left the ruins of the house. He didn’t bother to wipe his tears. Now that he’d been reminded what it meant to truly mourn something, he felt disordered inside. Part of him desired the insensitivity...wanted to curl up into his emotionless shell again and close it up tight. Yet, thinking about the boy he’d come to know in only too brief a time, he also now remembered why grief was important, and why it was not only a valueless, thorny waste of energy.
To grieve is to recognize loss, and to recognize loss is to value presence. He hadn’t thought in those terms in a span of forever, and it had been made clear to him again that there was something, still, to value in the presence of the human race, even if he was its destroyer. And if that was true, then there had to be something, still, to value in the human part of himself.
EJELANO!
His mind was still heavily on Brady, and that was why he didn’t notice the tremors until they had grown strong enough to rattle his knees. He looked around him in a start, shocked and alarmed by what he saw.
The White was almost upon him. Back down the path, back the way he had come, it was swallowing up the featureless land at an alarming pace. The ground at his feet was raked with heaving, splitting earth, and he had to concentrate to avoid being thrown down.
MOVE, YOU IDIOT!
He moved, all-out sprinted away from the chaos of the sudden quake. In his panic he almost red-lined on his power to hit his full speed.
NO! DON’T OVERLOAD YOURSELF! YOU’LL BE HELPLESS!
Ejelano came to his senses and held himself back, but only just barely as he acknowledged the truth in the spirit’s words. He couldn’t believe it; he’d almost doomed himself. Using the full extent of his power wasn’t a good idea.
He heard a groan, and the sound of cracking wood. In mid-stride, he cast a look back behind him, and was horrified to see the house, Brady’s house, sinking into the dirt...falling away into the void with the rest of the landscape. The walls collapsed, and the roof came down, and then it was gone, claimed by a horizon that was far nearer to him than it naturally should have ever been.
Ejelano kept pumping his legs, until he heard the rumbling begin to settle down. He sped up the nearest hill for a better view of what was happening behind him, and took in his surroundings in amazement.
The White now stretched all the way across his vision like a great band, and there was no break in it, no cloudy sky or gray land beyond its border. It appeared as though a great knife had cut away the world and discarded the remainder. The White itself was the antithesis of substance, utterly devoid of matter and form.
HOLY SHIT! I DON’T THINK THAT COULD HAVE BEEN ANY CLOSER.
“It’s moving faster,” Ejelano breathed, aghast.
YEAH, IT IS. YOU’D BETTER GET ON YOUR WAY...MOVE AS FAST AS YOU CAN SO YOU CAN OUTPACE IT. I’LL PICK UP THE SLACK, TRY TO GIVE YOU AS MUCH ENERGY AS I CAN, BUT YOU GOTTA KEEP MOVING, UNDERSTAND?
Ejelano nodded, but couldn’t take his eyes off of the deletion of the world. He’d lived through more than any human on the planet should have ever lived through, seen everything there was, and had lost his fear because of it. But now, faced with the unknown and prodded by the spirit’s discontent, he felt those icy tendrils again.
DAMN IT, WILL YOU...JUST...FUCKING...RUN, ALREADY?!
He ran.
* * *
Chapter 15 – Samuel
As Samuel made his way through the compound to have his “discussion” with Tristan Englewood, he noticed a marked thinness in the crowds. The sun was rising higher in the sky; there should have been many more people headed to the markets to barter their rations.
He also sensed a general moodiness, hanging in the air. Heads were bowed, smiles were strained and forced, and the volume of general conversation was turned way down from what was normal. Something in the back of his mind, something that was stubbornly trying to get his attention, was offering him the answer, but either unconsciously or purposefully he didn’t pay attention to it. He would find, however, that some realities will not suffer evasion.
There was a cluster of men and women around a small section of the Dome fencing. It looked like they were in a disorganized line for something, located on the fence itself; through the milling bodies Samuel could see sheets of paper flapping in the breeze. The folks in the front were huddling around these, scanning them with intensity. The ones who vacated the populated section of the fence, the ones who had finished perusing the documents, left the area with dark expressions. Some of them openly wept.
He saw a familiar face, near the front of the line. Ronny Baselton was there, waiting for his turn and shifting from foot to foot in his usual, anxious fashion. Ronny was fidgety...the nervous kind who had to see you coming to not jump out of his boots. Samuel had chosen him because he’d heard Ronny was good with electricity, although by his demeanor Samuel had suspected that he might have tasted the current he worked with a few too many times.
Ronny turned and saw Samuel limping toward him, and jerked his head in acknowledgment. It was a quick gesture, the kind one might see on a rodent. If Samuel had blinked, he might have missed it.
“Hey,” Ronny greeted him when got within earshot. The whites of the man’s eyes were slightly bloodshot, and he was even more shifty than usual. “I heard about Cameron. That guy was a bomb waiting to go off, but I never thought it would go as far as it did. It looks like he really did a number on you.”
“Yeah, well, it turns out my face is a pretty good shock absorber,” Samuel said, studying the crowd of people at the fence. He did some mental calculations. There had to be over fifty of them.
“How are you? I mean, I thought you were laid up.”
“I was, but now I’m good,” Samuel half-lied. He wasn’t looking to rehash the e
vents of his confrontation with Cameron, and so he was quick to change the subject. “What are you doing? Why are all these people here?”
“Gorman had his people...post a list.” Ronny’s voice broke a little. He cleared his throat to mask it, but Samuel could tell he was struggling with something. Then, Ronny noticed his confusion, and squinted at him. “Has nobody told you?”
“Told me what?”
“There was a rash of disappearances yesterday. Hundreds, they think, although the final count won’t be in until tomorrow or the next day. The most recent estimation is that about half of the original population is gone, now.” Ronny nodded toward the fence. “The list...it’s the names of all the people that have been taken. Everybody who’s been confirmed. I guess the Council decided that it would be better for people to know for sure...y’know?”
Samuel could only stare, aghast, while his heart fell into a deep hole. Hundreds? It was a staggering number of people. And in a day? One day?
What the hell was going on?
Things were accelerating, happening faster than they could figure it out. He had to wonder; how long would it be before the Spire was left a ghost town? How long before the only ones left were memories and dust?
“Damn....” he said. “I can’t believe that Henry and Kelly didn’t mention that. I’ll assume that everybody on the team is accounted for...they told me everybody is busy with repairs.” Then, a thought occurred to him. “Wait. Ronny, why are you here? Henry told me you were helping with the damage to the drill scaffolding.”
“I...I was,” the low-spirited man replied, sheepishly. “I snuck away. It’s Mary...my wife.” He sniffed, and wiped a hand across his face. “She wasn’t there when I woke up this morning. I thought that maybe she went out to the markets early; she likes to go first thing after she gets up, to beat the crowds. The thing is, though, we alternate days to let the other sleep in, and today wasn’t her day to go. It would be really unlike her to go against the routine. She’s like me...we’re kind of stuck in our ways.” He gave Samuel a weak smile.
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