Visions of the future seeped into the demented eyes of these young, malformed children, and were muttered from their whispering mouths, consumed with awe. Their only surcease from suffering came from the old Necrologists, from roots and medicines that only slowed the process but quickened the hallucinations. Inlojem had treated twenty of them and remembered each little face. He remembered watching them rock back and forth, side to side, their eyes losing their vital redness each day. The color was obfuscated with black, with the Oolyay’s darkness, until finally out of their mouths would come the muffled mentions of another dimension, where they could see the whole future as clear as a tri-moon-lit night.
Then the Uyor Sevoign had arrived with their cure. Their doctors, dressed in beige sanitary robes and wearing latex gloves, dispersed like lurking tethaguls through the town and pricked the arms of child prophets with needles. Those doctors looked at Vesh like Inlojem and Quantelenk and asked them questions like “how could you,” and “Did you know this was happening?” assuming he had the intellect of a child. He had brought Vesh back to life before. He knew.
It wasn’t long before the eyes of the remaining Oolyay child-prophets cleared and, exceedingly bothered by the bastard children of their makeshift Hagayalick allies, they had disappeared. They wandered out to the outskirts of the town and then over the mountains and simply ceased to exist. One or two took their lives with their own hands, cursing their saviors for stripping them of their prophetic gifts, but the rest listlessly wandered off, disappearing into the plains and the mountains. Those children had accepted death already, but their bodies had been spared. The Necrologists and villagers were not surprised when the skeletons of children were brought back by scouts and hunters, but pangs of sadness chipped at Inlojem’s stoic disposition upon seeing them. Vesh like Inlojem looked at the doctors and medics and asked questions like “how could you,” and “Did you know this would happen?”
The one that now sat next to Inlojem had been cured…listless, dead inside and visionless. Apparently he had been repeating the phrase, “You are the death-priest,” for days, once he found out that he was supposed to leave the town. From the look of the child, he was twenty, twenty-five harvests at most. Eight rotations, according to the heretics, Inlojem thought reflexively. A cold anger swelled in his heart as he automatically did this conversion. He hated to concede even a fraction of his soul to their methods.
Each harvest divided the planet’s celestial rotation period into thirds. When the Uyor folk arrived, they began to document tri-harvest cycles in singular full solar rotations and divided the days into twenty increments which they called bases. Inlojem kept to the harvest cycle. That meant that this one had been cured young enough that he probably didn’t even remember the dementia, or the hallucinations. He was just a prophet by name, because he muttered things and looked skinny, like an Oolyay child-prophet from the days of the Shades. Inlojem brought himself to look at the child sidelong, and thought...
“Impostor!” the child blurted, stealing Inlojem’s thought from his mind. “Impostors impostors impostors impostors impostors,” the child started repeating, impossibly fast. “Will you be my friend?! No, Pojlim don’t be silly! Don’t be his friend, he’s an imposter! Imposters imposters imposters!”
“Shut up!” one of the big Vesh soldiers barked callously at the child.
“Impos…tors,” the child trailed off feebly, his voice dwindling as he slouched and he went back to his quiet vigil. Inlojem growled faintly and shifted nervously. He was unsure of what to make of it, but his discarded faith in the Oolyay had taught him to assume coincidence ahead of miracle, so he disregarded the notion. The child sat next to him, mumbling some strange garbled language to himself, regional words smattered through his speech- words like “red people,” and “the tattooed female.” Inlojem wondered at these meandering thoughts. Finally, with no more patience to combat the child’s angst, he placed his tough, calloused palm on the child’s neck and commanded Iogi to be silent.
* * *
The truck sat parked on the side of the mountain road, its engine giving off the occasional hiss and tick while Pojlim checked the engine for signs of overheating. All the soldiers stood off to the side and lazily stretched their limbs, nursing their hangovers with grating white sunshine and the merciless sounds of nature. Inlojem stood like a statue and watched the young boy who sat in the Igu grass, pulling it up by tufts and dropping it on his knees until there was a pile of grass on him, then wiping it off and starting again. The boy sang an ancient Oolyayn hymn about a vicious massacre as he pulled up the grass, like it was a child’s melody.
Teftek glared at the map with a scowl that was almost ripping his jaw in half. Next to Teftek stood Aljefta, his beefy lieutenant with a capacity to follow orders that comprised the entirety of his usefulness. Teftek faintly smelled the strong mixture of Y’yoz and Utris Ale on Aljefta’s big sloppy, stubbly maw. The nose of a Vesh was mostly useless in detecting scents, but one scent that came through was Y’yoz. Aljefta was pointing to a particularly tricky mountain pass on the map with his sausage-like finger. The digit lacked a proper nail because Aljefta had torn it off with his teeth days before.
“It’ll take three days to get around, Captain,” Aljefta explained, remembering to use the respectful title at the end of every sentence. Teftek liked that about Aljefta. He was a hefty male with no creative mind to speak of. He had no sense of ingenuity or innovation regarding tactics or strategy, but he was a good navigator and he was unflinchingly obedient. Teftek could tell that Vesh to plug a discharger in his ass and fire, and Aljefta might just do it. “I can do it,” Aljefta followed, “but it’ll take at least three days - maybe four.”
“Angklem,” Teftek cursed under his breath. “Angklem Stuigis! Well, it’ll take four days - we both know you’re not so great with the wheel, and I have to sleep eventually…but we don’t have four days. The Recon Dispatch in Qol said we’ll have two days at most before whatever survivors were on that ship reach the city...”
“How do they know how fast the survivors are?” Pojlim asked from under the truck as he did routine maintenance. Teftek shrugged.
“Good question, let me just patch you in so you can ask a Standby at Qol 3.” Teftek scoffed. His soldiers chuckled.
“How many of those things were there?” Pojlim followed up.
“From what I heard, at least five were sighted and three went down immediately. Two of them were in our region, so we’re-“ Teftek paused, suddenly realizing; “Wait a unit, what do you care? Fix the stuigen truck!” Pojlim slid back under the truck, dejected. Teftek had briefed Aljefta on the mission, but wanted to keep the specifics somewhat guarded from his squad because the tension of the situation was already great. Teftek’s crew had been selected for a mission that seemed almost entirely useless, and which DGS seemed minimally invested.
They would, however, be choice candidates to survive the alien invasion if they completed this mission. All Teftek had to do was transport this lunatic and his little demon child up to a transport drop in the Northern country, where they could board all board one of several outbound orbital transports. Hopefully these small transports could slip by the alien invasion force and reach the Lugqua Colony on Tefadrem. Several had already been dispatched, and if Teftek wasn’t able to make it this one would leave without them. Three days was pushing it.
Inlojem walked up from the past the crowd of sobering soldiers to intone
“I grow impatient, and we still have much road ahead of us.”
“I grow impatient too,” Teftek remarked, subtly mocking him, “but dragging us through Shade country isn’t a snap decision, so why don’t you go back to trying to scare that boy to death, and I’ll figure out how to get us to our destination.”
“I know you think me an old fool, Teftek” Inlojem stated, as he pushed aside Teftek’s circle of grunts, approaching The Captain until they stood nose to nose. “I know you think that I am to be trifled with, that I will sit still as
you abuse me, but remember this; we tolerated your army’s presence because we assumed this world’s existence was indefinite. Now that it isn’t, do not test my patience, because I am no longer a representative of the Oolyay…I am just Inlojem, and I don’t like to be mocked by young boys playing soldiers.
Teftek doubled down on Inlojem’s toughness and moved closer, until their bodies were centimeters apart. “My title is Captain Teftek.” He growled. “And the next time you call me Teftek, we’ll see how tough you are when they find your body at the bottom of a gully, being fed on by Shades.” Everyone gripped their weapons tightly and no one moved. The tension was suffocating until a strange child peaked out from behind a nearby rock.
Pojlim’s head turned almost all the way around. Out of all these Vesh soldiers, Pojlim was probably the gentlest soul there; more concerned with the welfare of a child than with the competing pride of an old fool and a young soldier. He looked at the child’s face as it barely peaked over the rock, looking around at the platoon of Vesh through wide and frightened eyes. As Pojlim drew closer he realized that the child was more emaciated than Iogi, and seemed afraid of everyone, even Pojlim.
“Sir, child!” Pojlim yelled, as he walked toward the newcomer slowly. The child pulled back slightly as Pojlim drew near, but was not frightened enough to hide from him. “It’s okay, I know it’s probably been rough here, but none of us are here to hurt you. We’re all friendly,” Pojlim reassured the child as he came closer. The child stared at Pojlim with blank eyes, stock red and full of fear.
“Are you my friend?” the child asked blankly.
“NOOOO!” screamed Iogi, darting out from behind the truck. “IMPOSTER! IMPOSTER IMPOSTER IMPOSTER-“ Inlojem grabbed Iogi by the waist and scooped him up, holding the flailing mass of skinny limbs against him. Inlojem turned the child toward himself as Iogi scratched and raked at Inlojem’s arms, clawing like a wild animal to be free, screaming the same word over and over again at the top of his lungs.
“Enough!” Inlojem demanded, holding Iogi with one big hand by the back of his neck, and the other hand gripping his torso. He met Iogi’s eyes and Iogi calmed down, trying to release the right words while he still had time. He flailed. His eyes rolled into the back of his head and his tongue sputtered. Inlojem recognized this; Iogi was having a vision.
“Will you be my friend?” the child behind the rock asked, raising his head into view as Pojlim brought his hand closer.
“Of course I’ll be your friend,” Pojlim assured him. The child drifted seamlessly toward him, the sight of its legs still hidden behind the rocks.
Iogi was convulsing in the Necrologist's arms as Inlojem, entranced, held him tight. Then, all at once, the child-prophet stopped and lay dead still in the death priest’s arms. His eyes opened wide and fixed on Inlojem’s, and he said,
“The imposter is among you and rises to devour you.” Inlojem stared at the black eyes of Iogi, and then craned his neck toward Pojlim. Pojlim looked back at the group.
“You see, Iogi- everything’s okay!” Pojlim said. Suddenly, Teftek and Inlojem realized what was happening. The frame of the child behind the rock rose into the air, levitated by a thick, gray and black tentacle that emerged from the rock face itself.
“Pojlim, step away- now,” Teftek yelled, drawing his repeater and motioning to the other soldiers to prepare. Pojlim looked back and saw the tentacle rising above his head with the child’s frame attached to it. Inlojem quickly rushed Iogi to the truck and deposited him into the back of it, as the child fainted into unconsciousness.
“Will you be my friend?” the mimic-child asked again, the haunting strangeness of it chilling Pojlim to his core. Pojlim scrambled for his gun and fell onto his back, skittering through the dirt toward the other soldiers. They trained their guns on the transforming rock mass as it slowly disintegrated into a monster, complete with a dangling tentacle that merged into the form of the fake Vesh child in front of them. As its shape emerged from the rock face, Teftek recognized its form. This was the thing from the broadcast - the strange alien mass of tentacles that twitched and shuttered constantly. It scanned them , and kept asking the same question over and over again.
“Fio Rij Hagayal!” shouted one of the soldiers as he recognized it too. “It’s- it’s one of them, one of those aliens!”
Above Pojlim, the entity grew in size, twelve tentacles expanding out from a triangular blockhead with an eye or a sensor of some kind positioned squarely in the middle of it. The head rose as the tentacles scrabbled along the ground. Even when they found their footing, the tentacles still jittered and contorted every which way - panicked and convulsive. Vorstram repeaters rose in the hands of every soldier, squarely trained on the terrifying creature, the safeties clicking off and the clips being checked frantically. Above this rising doom, the dangling child puppet still asked them if they wanted to be its friend in a steady and chilling rhythm. Finally, Pojlim felt the Omblond Pistol’s circular grip-latch slip into his fingers, and he whipped it from his holster as fast as possible.
Before he could finish the action, Pojlim’s legs, arms and head were ripped from his body as six tentacles simultaneously gripped him and tore him apart. Everything that consisted of Pojlim was then thrown at the readied soldiers. As a spew of lavender gore was hurled across them, the soldiers barely flinched as they unloaded their weapons into the terror’s body, the puppet child screaming and convulsing. The monstrous alien moved toward them and grabbed another soldier, tearing him into pieces and pushing through the weapons-fire while it still had strength.
Inlojem heard the screaming and firing from the back of the truck and jumped out, his sickle-blade handle downward, the metal curved toward the ground. He saw five other forms emerge from the rock-face behind them and rush the soldiers around him. They skittered and jeered, parts of them morphing into vibrating faces of Vesh or plants around them. The air between their tentacles turned patchy and dark, or wavy, oscillating in and out of existence.
“Fools! Behind you!” He yelled as he rushed toward one of the emerging shapes. The soldiers turned and began to erratically open fire through the paralyzing fear of seeing more of them. Inlojem’s foot was grabbed by a tentacle, but he sliced through it instantly with the sickle-blade. The gripping, severed tentacle still clung around his foot as he hacked and slashed to avoid being grabbed again. He worked his way around the gyrating organic mass, keeping under its bulky head to avoid its vision, careful not to touch it in any way. Its tentacles morphed and changed, creating cutting edges and blunt weapons to stab and smash him with, but he clipped them from its body as it maneuvered to catch him. Finally he thrust his frame atop its head and angled the front of the sickle-blade into the center of its tentacled mass and held onto it. He could feel its tentacles wrap around him, but their strength drained as the blade cut deeper and deeper.
“Hold your ground!” Teftek yelled, still firing at the first monster, knocking it down each time it tried to stand up and regenerate. He kept aiming at the same grouping of bullet wounds and dared not take his eyes off of it. Aljefta reloaded his clips and pumped round after round into the first monster as the soldiers around them screamed and violet blood poured across the landscape. “We’ve got to get out of here,” he muttered to Aljefta, who nodded in agreement. Teftek glanced over to see Inlojem with the head of a monster pinned to the ground, its weak tentacles unable to free itself. He dropped his gun and yanked out his machete, sprinting into a slide along the dirty, rocky path toward the first monster. As he drew close with his machete out, the child-puppet asked him “Why don’t you want to be friends?” A tentacle slid around Teftek, but he had already jammed his machete, with full force, into the sensory orb in the front of the alien’s head, and the tentacle convulsed as Aljefta unloaded his weapon into it. It had enough strength to throw Teftek off of it, but the machete was lodged straight into the thing’s brain as far as Teftek could tell.
With consciousness fading in and out, Teftek felt the back of
his bleeding head. He had been thrown against the metal cab of the truck and had rolled off of it like a rag-doll. He laughed with a bizarre nonchalance as the rampage of violence against his soldiers continued. At the beginning there had been thirty-five of them. Now he counted…twelve? Thirteen? “Yeah…what do I know about death?” He closed his eyes. The screams accompanied his departure into what he simply assumed would be nothing. “Good cover, Aljefta…good…cover.”
III
For a while Teftek dreamed. He dreamed of blackness, of a deep consuming shroud that enveloped his whole being, but not nothingness, not absence. Just blackness. He floated in complete stasis, and although his mind tended to wonder for just a moment, whether he even had limbs or a corporeal form, he never bothered to check. Don’t worry about it, he told himself. You’re better off just floating anyway. So he floated, and pieced his life together, assuming that this might have been the end of it. He thought that he was supposed to fall through his life like it was a tunnel. That’s what other Vesh had told him but, then again, they had also spouted silly nonsense about the Oolyay and about Fio Rij Hagayal.
Instead, he could only think about his life and recall images in his mind’s eye. Perhaps the blackness made it easier for him to envision his past. An image was conjured up; his father was teaching him to hunt. Only flashes ensnared Teftek’s mind. He felt the wood of the rifle stock and the massive concrete textured mitts of his father’s hands, which radiated warmth when they repositioned Teftek’s hands on the gun. He heard the soft rustle of the forest under his condensed frame as he shifted this way and that, and the call of a Qiptep, leaping from tree to tree. He saw the steam of his breath rise up, in front of the scope, as a Kyrun ambled into his shot, and presented itself for holy death. He felt the blood on his hand as he ran it over the carcass of the thing he had killed while his father prattled on about Hagayal, and felt his own boyish hand wipe the tears off his face, careful not to show his father, who knew anyway.
The Reward of The Oolyay Page 3
