by Quil Carter
“Scared, love?”
My eyes widened. I looked at Silas, but when we made eye contact, he laughed, the same light-as-a-feather laugh and shook his head as the driver slowed the car down. “You’re too uptight, lovely man. Much too uptight.” He leaned to me and kissed my tight cheek, then, when the car came to a stop, he opened the door and hopped out.
I stared at him, or where he had been just a moment ago, and slowly got out as well.
Silas continued watching me, his green eyes bright as a newly polished emerald. The king seemed to soak in apprehension, but there was something off with his look. Nothing bad, on the contrary, there was a playfulness to it that gave me tentative ease.
“Force of habit, Master,” I said as I scanned the air strip and the brick building that housed the legionaries of the greywastes. “I… just…”
Silas turned from me with a smirk, and began heading towards the flat pavement that had more than two dozen planes of various sizes and designs parked amongst military and all-terrain vehicles. There was nothing else behind him but the twenty-foot brick and barbwire wall that surrounded the military base, the watchtowers, and the speckle of legionary I could see stationed along the wall.
Then it hit me.
“We’re… we’re going on a plane?” I asked bewildered.
“Oh, he is an intelligence chimera!” Silas crowed. “I was having my doubts.”
I followed behind, a dumbstruck look on my face. “Where are we going?” What was this man planning? I caught up with him and saw that he was leading me to a Falconer plane.
“I told you, love,” Silas called. He pulled open the Falconer’s sliding metal doors and jumped inside. He waved me in and walked to the cockpit. “Close the door behind you.”
I was still nervous about all of this, but the nerves were now swimming around in a lake of confusion. At least he seemed happy, but if there was one hard lesson I’d had to learn… it was that Silas’s moods changed on a whim.
After closing the cargo hold door, I turned and began walking to the cockpit. I noticed to my left an assault rifle case and a backpack beside it, and my nose picked up the smell of dinner. We were at least still eating, so this wasn’t some ambush he was planning for me. I think out of all the evidence I’d seen, that calmed me down the most.
But I still felt like I was walking on porcupine quills.
I sat beside Silas in the co-pilot’s chair, and he lifted the plane off to the ground. I watched as the other planes became small, then we flew up high enough that the entire brick wall of the military base could be seen. Silas then switched the Falconer’s jet thrusters, and we began to shoot forward, the grey ocean to my right, and the tall skyscrapers, most abandoned, in front of us.
Silas flew above the skyscrapers and the buildings, and while looking down, I could see discoloured strips that were the walls of Nyx and Eros; two slices of grey currently being built by the workers with tarp-covered supplies surrounding the unfinished tips. Seeing that done brought me flickers of pride, those two districts had been my idea after all.
“The first time I brought you on the plane, you were so enchanted with it,” Silas said when he noticed me staring intently out the window. “Garrett and Ellis both cried, but you and Nero had your faces pressed right up against the window. You both took turns standing on the seat, until you decided to crawl onto my lap. I believe you were one, maybe one and a half.”
“I remember it,” I said, recalling that memory. I remember being scared, but…
I hesitated, not wanting to say it. However, my mouth decided to move faster than my brain. “Being near you, and seeing that you weren’t scared, helped. I remember always thinking that, as long as Master Silas wasn’t scared, I didn’t have to be scared.”
Silas was quiet after I said this. I continued to stare at the ground we were flying over, Skyfall now behind us and the grey rocky outlands in front. It appeared that we were going southeast along Skyfall Island, the Dead Islands were in this direction, but the plane was hugging the coast tightly.
“You certainly loved me a lot back then,” Silas said. His tone was low, seemingly heavy with emotion. But what that emotion was, I didn’t know. Guilt? Regret? Or just the thick voice most people got when recalling a treasured memory?
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I said nothing. The cockpit remained in silence after those weighted words, only the rough sound of the engine, and the occasional beep of the onboard computer that was imbedded in the plane’s controls.
When I could see the grey outlines of buildings in the distance, just faint charcoal rubbings on a backdrop of old paper, Silas raised a hand and motioned to them. “Do you know what town this is, love?” he asked.
We’d passed several small island towns, all of their buildings empty vessels with dark windows unboarded and gaping. They were exposed to every element, as if purposely committing suicide so Father Fallocaust could reclaim them with dunes of dusty ash. This particular town didn’t seem any different. It was coastal, though all the piers and oceanfront structures had collapsed into the grey sea from the corrosive salty ocean. I could see the skeletal remains of a barge however, just a rusted brown frame that stuck out of the murky water like bones.
It would’ve been a beautiful town had the Fallocaust not happened, a tourist town for sure. But now it was just another empty blight on the dead world’s surface, one that would’ve been reclaimed by nature had the radiation not changed the earth into a grey mausoleum of death.
I glanced at the structures below, and saw many roads cutting through the monotone landscape, several of them packed with vehicles waiting to go through a checkpoint. Everything was a marble slate, different tones but all of them grey, spreading out underneath me and coloured the shade of a drowned corpse. “No… I’m afraid I don’t know what town this is,” was my reply.
Silas sighed. “I suppose it’s my fault… I never talked about my life before the Fallocaust. And now my own heir doesn’t know the origins of his creator.”
This statement piqued my interest, but I didn’t want to show it. Even though Silas now had my undivided attention, still I gazed out the window; the reflection showing me my own face, and purple eyes that looked over the destruction and death like a Greek god atop Olympus.
“I’m always interested in learning things,” I said simply. We approached the city and I heard and felt the Falconer’s engine rise to a higher octave, this was followed by the light whining noise of the thrusters changing their position so we could land.
Silas didn’t respond. His eyes were on the screen in front of him, a camera, which could switch to night vision if needed be, showing him the ground directly below him so he could park the plane without accidently landing on an obstruction. I watched him park, my desire to learn making me pay close attention so I could become a better pilot myself, and when he touched down onto a broken two-lane street, black trees, cracked pavement, and bowing street lights on all sides of us, I rose and walked to the cargo hold to open the doors.
“Wait a moment, love,” Silas called, stopping my movements. He turned off the Falconer’s engine, the silence that followed this jarringly quiet, and stepped in front of me to open the door himself.
Silas then hopped soundlessly onto the highway, broken pavement making their own mosaic patterns underneath his boots, and he became still.
I also stayed still, the only noise our heartbeats squishing and pumping inside of our chests. I listened to the world around us, but heard nothing that would suggest we weren’t alone.
“The first thing I taught Nero and Ellis when I brought them to the greywastes, was three things.” Silas motioned for me to follow him, and, as quiet a I could, I stepped down from the Falconer and onto the ground beside him.
“First thing you do… is you make sure you’re armed and supplied.” Silas looked behind me, and when I turned I saw that he was looking at the assault rifle case and backpack that he’d brought with us.
Obedient
ly, I stepped back onto the Falconer and grabbed the assault rifle out of the case, then the backpack that was full of food.
“The second thing you do… is you use the senses I designed you with,” Silas continued to instruct. “You listen with your enhanced hearing, you see with your enhanced sight, you smell with your enhanced sense of smell. But also…” Silas walked ahead and I followed. “Get a feel for the area. If you feel uneasy with your surroundings, don’t just shrug it off. You have instincts inside of you that should warn you of unseen danger. Never ignore your instincts, Elish.”
“Yes, Master,” I said back. What I’d initially thought was a dinner date, was quickly turning into some weird survival lesson.
Perhaps he was going to just leave me here and fly back to Skyfall, like an unwanted dog getting driven to the countryside.
“I won’t be sending you out into the greywastes much until you’re immortal,” Silas continued. He began to walk along the road. There were black trees to our right, clinging to sloping terrain, most surrounded by snarled roots that bowed up from the ground like a serpent in water. To our left was a row of buildings, some with signs that had memories of colour. I spotted a Quality Foods grocery store, and beside it Japanese words which suggested a sushi place, then a liquor store which had red writing so bold it had bled through the ash and was quite clearly read. The rest of the shops were a mystery to me, the signs either missing or broken off in chunks like they were only to be spoken with a stutter.
I crossed the street with Silas, stepping over a fallen telephone pole and brushing dead electrical lines with my feet. I followed my master as he jogged up an incline, to bring us level with the plaza I hadn’t realized he was heading towards. Then, always in his shadow, I traced his steps as he walked around a Tim Hortons building in the middle of the parking lot, and peeked in to see the dusty museum inside.
Silas stopped in front of one of the coffee shop’s windows. I stopped with him and looked at my reflection in the dirty-stained glass.
But my eyes shifted to Silas when I saw the heaviness in his eyes. And when I looked to him, he looked away, his lips tight, and carried on wordlessly. There was a dark cloud surrounding this immortal king, the closest thing to a god this world had ever known, and with every step King Silas took deeper into this forgotten town… that darkness thickened.
You know… I’d seen the greywastes before during trips to Cardinalhall and Kreig. I’d seen the ruins of Nanaimo, the city that Cristo and Dylan had fled to when they’d taken my brother and I. This destruction, this silent standing remnants of a dead society, was normal for me now, just scenery to round out my existence.
But today, it was different… and it wasn’t until I heard Silas sniff, that I understood why.
Because this wasn’t just ruins to him.
This was his home.
I found myself… moved by this realization. And while following my king, now walking slowly past vehicles left to rust where their owners had died, I felt the glass around my heart give the smallest of fractures.
Was this… Julian’s influence again? Or perhaps I was a fool who still believed that everything would be fine as long as Silas wasn’t scared.
“Did… you ever have coffee in that building?” My heart defied the hatred I’d let contaminate me against my king. I knew one day I would look back on this moment and wish I’d poisoned him while he was weak, not offer a supportive hand, but that day was not today.
“Yes, love,” Silas whispered. His shoulders tightened and he wiped his eyes with his sleeve. “Sky, Perish… and others that I’ve never spoke of. We would come here for coffee and donuts, sometimes in the middle of the night.” He looked to the store as we walked past it, a building that now had black streaks dripping down its warped structure like it had been bleeding. Like most stores, the entire front was made up of windows and glass motion sensor doors. But unlike the boarded up ones in Skyfall, these windows had been broken and now stood with grime-covered glass shards in their frames, stuck in like imbedded daggers. And because the glass was broken, I could see dunes of ash inside, some high enough to completely cover the checkout tills. “This is where I’d buy my food. The world ended and… I still had over seven hundred and fifty thousand Q-points at that store.” He laughed dryly at this. “Oh, the dumb things you think of…”
Silas gave the dilapidated building one last glance, then he sighed deeply and we both rounded the corner of the building towards another road. This road was smaller than the one we’d parked the Falconer on. There were a lot of houses still standing in the distance, and a flat expanse of nothing which told me the area had once been a park.
“Are you sure… this is where you want to be, Master?” I asked, trying to keep my tone supportive. It was difficult for me to realize, but I was uncomfortable seeing him in this state. I was much better at fighting the devil I knew; this mask was one I had never seen before.
Perhaps because there was no mask.
“Yes, love,” Silas replied. “Sometimes… I believe I need a reality check. And coming back to my home always helped me.”
My brow knitted at this response. I glanced at an old church, the white paint on the wooden boards now curled and sloughing off, like a snake attempting to shed its skin. The way the paint lifted and peeled in clustered blisters, had always made me uneasy which didn’t help the strange sensations rushing through my heart. “What did you need help with?”
Silas chuckled, a mordant laugh that held more than a few samples of self-derision. “You’re polite, love. You’ve always been the polite one.” We turned on another street, this one with an abandoned city bus that had jackknifed itself in the middle of the road. While passing it, I was fascinated to see corpses strewn across the isles and seats like a giant had come and shaken the vehicle. They were all covered in ash, but I could see stained bones sticking out of lumps of brown clothing.
“I caught this bus thousands of times,” he said to me as we walked around it. Then he pointed to the house that was visible on the other side.
I looked and saw that this house had red spray paint across the garage door. God Help Us was what it said.
Then Silas pointed to the door, and I swallowed a lump in my throat when I saw that the door held the marks of heavy violence; it looked like someone with an axe had forced themselves in. “His name was Hans,” Silas explained. “Nicholai cleaned for him to make extra money. He was tortured for information on our whereabouts; we’d already fled back to the lake house by then.” Again he pointed, this time to the other side of the street.
And there was another message, this one painted in black spray paint. Tick Tock Goes The Clock Seiben Zwei.
“Seiben Zwei,” I whispered. I’d heard that name before. Where had I heard it?
Then I remembered. “Perish called you that,” I said.
With a tight face, Silas nodded. “Yes, I was a born into gruppe seiben, group seven, and I was the second child born. In the institute I was born into… that was my name for the first several years of my life. I was not a child; I was not human… I was merely a number… Seiben Zwei.” Silas’s face twisted for a moment, but with a temporary shutting of his eyes, he got a hold of himself and straightened his posture. “I didn’t name myself Silas Sebastian Dekker until I was a bit older. Still a child, but older than I was when we were smuggled out.”
“But…” I looked around the abandoned city in wonder. “Who was looking for you?”
“A man who… is now dead,” Silas said. “He’s… gone and he’ll never hurt my family again.” Well, that went without saying; everyone at this time besides Silas and Perish were dead. “But that lingering nightmare is not why I brought you here today, Elish.” Silas smiled at me, a smile that seemed physically difficult to make. “You don’t think I forgot this is supposed to be our little dinner date.” He wiped his eyes with a chuckle. “I know it must confuse you what I’m doing… but I promise you, love, there are methods to my madness.”
He
motioned me to follow and we crossed the street to yet another road. This one much smaller than the others, single lane, not even a faded yellow stripe down the middle. We were deep into the suburbs now and it appeared to be a well-off neighbourhood as well. The houses were all two-storey buildings that once looked to have been quite expensive. They were designed with peaked roofs and balconies outside of master bedrooms, two car garages, and large windows that were now mostly shattered.
The house Silas was walking us towards was just as impressive, if not more so, than its neighbours. Even in the state of disrepair one could see the architecture of the building: lattice windows, now clouded with grey grime, double doors with stained glass, both glass panes still intact, and the exterior was in better condition than I’d think normal for this area, which made me think that Silas had had people here to take care of it. Yes, there was still that black stain that I’d been seeing on the buildings, this one more noticeable with the house’s white exterior, but the bones of the house had remained intact, and the roof…
I looked up and realized that the shingles on the roof were new and shining, like black sandpaper, and the old shingles had been tossed into the neighbour’s backyard. I was right in my assumption; this place had been taken care of recently.
“I spent years here,” Silas whispered beside me. He stopped in the driveway and filled his lungs with air, the scent around us fresh, with the lingering aroma of decay that all abandoned towns seemed to have. “Some of the best years of my life…” I waited for him to continue walking but he seemed glued where his memories had left him. “Until… until the war that had seemed so far away, came to our island. And with that war… the man who would hunt us down like dogs.” He closed his eyes and another inhale stretched his lungs.
“The troubles I have now… are nothing in comparison to what I’ve had to endure,” Silas said. “My life is grand compared to… what I saw, and what Sky and I both saw when we fled from that lab.”
