“It’s true. We didn’t even know there was something above us, if you can believe it? We didn’t know about Superiors. Not until they came in the night and changed us. But we didn’t know what they were, we didn’t understand what we were. Not until later. They just let us loose to kill all the homo-sapiens. And we did.”
“All in one night.”
“No, that part is a myth. But it did happen fast. So fast. We were younger, and not as strong, but we were a lot stronger than the saps. And you know there were no rations, no limits. We ate as much as we wanted, and we got strong fast.”
“How much did you draw from a human, though?”
“All of it.”
“You drained them?” Draven couldn’t imagine drinking all of a sap. It didn’t seem possible that one person could eat that much.
“Yes. I guess you could say we should have known better, but the truth is, we were like animals, even more than they were. That’s why the Superiors let us loose—they knew what we would do, and that’s exactly what they wanted. And when everyone around us was doing the same thing…it became mob mentality. It wasn’t pretty, but that’s what happened. We went into houses, or waited for them to come out, or tricked them into coming out, and then we killed them.”
“How many sapiens did you kill?”
“All of them.” Byron took a drink of wine. “Except the kids. The First Order ordered us not to. I’m sure some people did anyway, but a lot of the kids were saved. And we’d been told we’d be killed, so if we had any self-control we stayed away from the kids. The First Order, they tried to go into the houses with kids and get them out before we went in. Of course that wasn’t always possible. There were a lot more of us. But no one wants to drain a baby, so whatever humanity we had left might have given us pause,” Byron said. “We were rewarded for coaxing the children out, too.”
“And what of your children?”
“Ah, yes. We changed them later. But yes, we had kids. We were both changed at the same time, my wife and I. We lived in a city called Phoenix. It was destroyed in the War. It’s north of here, out of the Funnel and west.”
“So how long did it take?” Draven asked.
“The Takeover? Not long, I’ll tell you that much. They hit the cities first, and invaded small towns more slowly, evolving everyone in a town over a few days or weeks. They would bring one person through the evolution and then set them free, and soon enough everyone had joined or died. It took…I don’t know exactly. It wasn’t a night. But maybe a few years.”
“Years? Really?”
“Yes. To get everyone from all the secluded spots all over the world…it took time. But we were already ruling by then, of course. I mean, the First Order was ruling. I’m getting more wine, my friend. Do you want some?”
“Thank you no, sir.”
Byron stumbled to his feet and retrieved another wine bottle. “Cheers, my friend, here’s to our successful capture of the man Ander, and to our safe journey home.”
“And getting paid for it,” Draven added, nodding to the salute.
“And that,” Byron said, laughing. “I guess you’ll have your money for traveling now.”
“I imagine so.” Draven was quiet, thinking. Thinking about telling Cali, about going to the Confinement to retrieve her, about taking her home. She would be his, finally. It seemed such a long time he had worked for her, although he knew that in reality, it was no time at all. It would have taken far longer if he had only his employment earnings, if Byron hadn’t taken an interest in him. Capturing those escapees, and especially Ander, had turned a far-fetched possibility into a reality. He would have enough for her right away, as soon as he received payment for his service. It would all be worth it then.
“Byron,” Draven said, when both men had lost themselves in their thoughts for a while.
“Yeah, soldier?”
“You never quite told me why you hate sapiens so much.”
“I didn’t?”
“Not exactly. You almost sounded like you hated Superiors from what you said.”
Byron laughed. “Hated Superiors, huh? No, I wouldn’t say that. I just wanted to let you know how lucky you were to have evolved in such a way. Your transition was easy. Of course, a lot of that was due to necessity. If you had gone crazy on the sapiens like we did, none of us would be here. There would be nothing left to eat and we’d all have starved by now.”
“That’s true.”
“That’s why those of the Second Order are much stronger than you. Also our generation’s evolution was slower. Over a few years and even after that, we could take a human we wanted for whatever reason, and take them through the evolution process. It wasn’t until later when we started running out of food that it became illegal. In fact, all through the Hundred Year War, humans evolved. Just to be sent into war, of course. That’s all they were meant for, and hardly any of them lived. They’re more the Second Order and a half. There’s only a few of them left, though, and they are counted among the Second Order since there are so few of them. Ander was one.”
“Ander? I did not know this.”
“Anyone changed before the Second Evolution is classified as Second Order, no matter when they evolved. The later ones had a better experience than those of us in the first wave. But we were all created for the same purpose. You, me, Ander. We were fighting different enemies, but we were all created to kill. That was our purpose. We’re killing machines.”
“Ander is the first person I’ve ever killed.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes. As I’ve said, I’ve never even killed an animal or a sap.”
“Some would say you’re a lucky man. You have nothing on your conscience.”
“I do now.”
“How do you feel?”
“That I did a terrible thing, but that I had no choice.”
“We always have a choice, Draven. At first, I felt as you do, but now I know.”
Draven sat up, glaring at his friend and superior. “And what was my choice? To let him kill us both? What kind of choice is that?”
“It’s a choice, Draven. You chose to live, as we are living. You had a choice, and you made the right one. That’s all.”
“You may call it a choice,” Draven said. “But I don’t see it as any kind of choice at all.”
“I know. That’s how we protect our conscience. That’s how we go on after doing terrible things.”
“And you would know?”
“I do know. I killed many men in the war, and in the line of duty, and I don’t know how many saps. But they don’t count. They aren’t people. Just vile and filthy creatures that unfortunately can evolve into one of us. The only thing good that comes from them is their sap, and if I can get it without thinking about where it came from, all the better.”
“Then why do you own them instead of simply drinking canned sap?”
“It’s easier, especially with the family, not to have to go buy it. Plus, we get more from them than we would through the rationing program. Ah, I’m afraid I’ve drunk too much and spoken too much. You must be bored with my stories of the old days.”
“No, no. They are quite fascinating. I try to imagine that world, but I cannot.”
“It was a frightful time, my friend. I could have died instead of evolving. I’m only lucky that someone decided to help me out, and my wife. I think it was only at random, mostly. First Orders, they evolved whoever they could and let us loose until they thought enough of us had evolved to wipe out the rest of the city. It was a bloodbath, quite literally. Only later we found our children, months later, and got permission to evolve them. My wife wanted to, and I guess I did too, although I had reservations. But she insisted, and she can be quite insistent.” Byron laughed. “I love her now the same as I did then. I’d do anything for her. Never could deny her. In a way I didn’t want to change them, because I thought they’d end up getting shipped off to war, you know. Thought they’d be better off just getting bitten. But my wif
e, she said this way there was a chance they’d live and if they stayed sapiens, they were guaranteed death. So we did it.”
“You didn’t want to give them this life?”
“Not because I dislike being Superior. No, the only thing I don’t like is that I was ever human at all. Sometimes I look at them, and I cannot fathom I was once such a moronic creatures. That I was ever so pathetic and hideous and I never knew it at all. But then, I suppose that’s part of stupidity—not knowing how stupid they are.” He laughed again, and Draven did too, though he thought about Cali, that she didn’t seem brainless. Instead of not knowing her stupidity, she did not know her intelligence.
“Yes, that, and I don’t like remembering the change, the animal way we were when we were evolving, before we’d become truly Superior. I can deal with having killed all the sapiens—they needed to be killed, and it made me strong, and I needed to eat. It’s the way we did it, so savage, like rabid wolves. Disgusting. I don’t like to think of myself that way. I had misfortune, too, Draven. You can’t imagine how it was for us, not knowing what we were or how we got to be that way or what we were doing. The things I did… I did some horrible things without knowing what I was doing, and that weighs on my conscience, even though I still believe to this day I didn’t have a choice. And that’s the thing that weighs on me more than any of the choices I made that killed someone.”
“What thing?” Draven asked, not certain he wanted to know what could weigh on the conscience of a man as morally firm as Byron.
“A man like Ander… I could kill him and I’d take responsibility for ending his life. But I’d have a choice. Back then…we were just filled with bloodlust and confusion and fear and power. We didn’t know our strength or what we could do.”
“You have told me so many times that you didn’t know, that I can’t know. I believe you. I can remember the way I felt after the evolution, and I believe I would have killed a sapien, even a Superior if he tried to stop me from getting at the food. I’m glad for the way I was treated, even though at the time I was mad with anger at being chained up and restrained that way. I took a bite of the flesh of the first person I bit. I didn’t know how to do it at all, even though of course I’d been drawn from myself. I just wanted it so much.”
“Yes, I suppose that part was the same for you. They say if you don’t eat long enough, you’ll go into a form of sleep, a coma, and when you wake you feel that way again. But I don’t think it’s ever like that, not once you’ve known how to control yourself and how to draw correctly.”
“All this talk, it’s making me quite hungry,” Draven said, and both men laughed.
“I’ll tell you what I did to my first sapien, and you won’t want to eat for days.”
Draven poked the fire and thought about the sapien from Estrella’s sleeping somewhere undisturbed, and he didn’t imagine anything could make him not want to eat.
They sat in silence for a time. Byron took out a tin and handed Draven a cigarette, and both men smoked and listened to the fire crackle and the wind whine over the sand. When he had finished, Byron spoke. “I woke in the apartment where I lived with my wife and my children. I am only thankful I didn’t find my children sleeping upstairs. But maybe the First Order had already removed them, I don’t know.”
He shuddered and then went on. “I woke first, and I had this panicked feeling, because I thought I’d died. And I saw my wife, and she hadn’t woken, and I thought she was dead, and I tried to rouse her but she didn’t wake. I was torn with anguish and anger and this frenzy I didn’t know then was hunger, because it’s not like the hunger of a human, that need to feed. I tried for a long time to wake her before I gave up and left. In all the streets the evolution was taking place. They were everywhere, running and screaming and searching for this thing, and we didn’t know what it was at first. Only this need.”
Byron stopped to toss another twisted branch into the center of the fire. Sparks went flying and the coals rolled and bounced from the pit. Draven pushed them back while Byron continued. “When we found a sapien, we could smell it, you know. The first time, I didn’t even know what I was smelling. I had this need, and I smelled the thing that I needed, and I found her in the stairwell of an apartment building. She didn’t know what was going on, but she could hear people screaming and she was going home I guess, running up the stairs when I caught her.
“I didn’t know what I was, I had never heard of Superiors, and I didn’t know that I would feed on sapiens the rest of my life. I didn’t even know I wasn’t a sapien anymore. I just found her, and I needed her, and she smelled, oh God. Like you wouldn’t believe how irresistible. She had her time of the month, you see, and that was what drove me crazy. I didn’t know what I was doing, what I was supposed to do, that I should bite her neck or her vein. I just smelled sap and I wanted it, so I drew from the source. And I had never done that, you know, as a human, in any capacity except for sexual. I thought that’s what was driving me mad, I thought it was some kind of sexual lust and not a blood lust. So after I couldn’t fulfill that craving, it was still so strong, and I…I…” Byron stopped speaking and finished the wine and threw the bottle into the fire.
Draven didn’t speak. The story was fascinating in its horror. He couldn’t bear to hear it, but he couldn’t tell Byron to stop either. And it explained the Enforcer’s disgust, his guilt, his hatred for those who prostituted and consorted with saps.
“I forced myself on the human. I didn’t know I wasn’t human then, I didn’t know what I was, or how strong I was, or what I needed to do to satiate myself. I don’t think I knew much of anything right then, except that I was out of my mind with this gut-wrenching hunger and I didn’t know how to feed it.”
“What happened to her?”
“When I got up from the girl, she was dead. I’d crushed her. I was out of control, and I didn’t know I was so powerful. I didn’t know I was inhumanly strong. That’s the first thing I ever killed. Just a human girl, a sap. An animal. Now when I think of it, it doesn’t seem so bad to have killed it. I’ve killed many saps since then, even lots that same night. But I…I suppose it hit me that way because I didn’t know when I did it that I wasn’t human.
“I reacted as a human who killed another human by brutal means, brute force. For a moment after, just one moment before the bloodlust set back in, I saw what I had done and through human eyes. I don’t know how to forget it, Draven. I’ve had it with me for two hundred years, and I can’t make it as inconsequential as it is. It’s that one, that first thing I killed when I thought I was still just like her, that’s what stuck. I can’t ever forget that like I should, even knowing it was just a dumb sap and someone else would have killed her that night anyway.”
“That’s true,” Draven said, both horrified and intensely sorry for his friend.
“After that I wanted to run away, you know, when I saw what I’d done. But she was bleeding and that set me off and I drew everything from her afterwards, and then I realized what the thirst was, how to fill it. I never touched another sap that way again. I feel sick just thinking about it.”
“That makes sense,” Draven said slowly. “At least you aren’t like those men, like Ander, with the strange fetish for sapiens.”
“Yes, sexual predators… It’s a perversion, soldier. A sickness. And you know, in over two hundred years, that’s the only time I’ve ever been unfaithful in my marriage. It’s one of the only things I’ve ever kept from Marisol, besides work cases that have to stay confidential. I was unfaithful to my wife that one time only, in two centuries. And with a sap. My stomach turns when I think of it. I didn’t know I wasn’t one, or that she was a different species than me and that it was wrong. I didn’t know I was any different from the thing in the stairwell, and I thought my wife was dead. But I still did it.”
“And that’s why you hate them?”
“I don’t hate them, exactly. I’m just repulsed by them. Maybe that’s why, I don’t know. Because I did that not k
nowing I was Superior already, that I’d evolved. And because she was out instead of at home, and of all the saps to run into it had to be one having her cycle. If it had been anyone else, it would have been different maybe, I don’t know. I only know what happened to me. When the Second Evolution came around, I was careful, I helped bring it about. For the ones I evolved, I explained it very thoroughly. I told them what was happening, that they would be Superiors afterwards, how they would feel, everything. I didn’t want anyone to ever have an experience anything like mine. The man in charge of your evolution, Draven, was he a good man?”
“I believe so. He didn’t explain that well, but he told me. And he was quite kind, calming me. I was just a scared sap. He wasn’t a cruel man.”
“That is good, my friend. Now you have my stories, and I’ve been going on all night. I fear I’m quite drunk. I’m going to go vomit it all up before it’s time to sleep.”
When Byron left the fire to rid himself of the foreign substance, Draven sat thinking of the brutal story he’d heard. Of course he knew the basic story of the Takeover. Everyone knew that. But hearing it from someone who had lived through it… He hadn’t thought about how old Byron was. He had lived through so much, seen and done so many things.
Byron came swaying back to the fire and sat. “Let me ask you this, my friend. Now that you know why I hate the men who hire out the humans for this reason…you know what I think of men who use them, how hard I will work to bring every one of them down. Do you think now I am a hypocrite?”
“Because you did once what you so loathe?” Draven paused and thought over the question before answering. “No. I find only you have more reason to be genuine in your hatred of it. Hating what you know, hating what you’ve done—that’s more genuine than hating something you don’t know.”
“Thank you for seeing it that way, soldier. Now I think I’m pissing drunk and going to bed early. We have a long night of travel ahead.”
Draven stayed awake a while longer, until morning lit the desert sky. He thought about the night before, about his new knowledge of his friend. And about what his friend had done, about the awfulness of his experience and the guilt he carried from it for so long, that he would never escape. Perhaps he should have felt disgust for Byron. Perhaps he should have felt pity and loathing for the way Byron had killed the sap and the weight of it on his conscience. He did feel a bit of these things.
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