Sinners- The Dawn Of Kalki

by Naveen Durgaraju

  NIGHT OF MANY DEATHS

  It was the night that those who chanced upon the Librarian’ book later in the End Age would know only as the Night of Many Deaths.

  What many would never know is that the seeds of the Night of Many Deaths were sown on the other fateful night –the Night of the kinkars. A strange thread of fate ran between them –the two nights that had changed the Sinless forever and led them across new paths.

  It was the Ashvin guarding the prayer hall who saw it first. The same Ashvin who had let Sudam into the Yajna mandap that evening when he had heard the secret words.

  It started as a curious set of sounds...grunts and hisses emanating from the Yajna mandap. The Ashvin thought his ears were playing a trick on him. There couldn’t be anyone in the Yajna hall right now. The only one who had been inside that day was that fumbling scout with the right words – what was his name? He couldn't recollect, but he had seen him walk out of the hall and none had entered it since. But the sounds did seem to be coming from the hall and they were getting louder by the minute.

  He couldn't leave his post to go into the holy sanctum to check. It was forbidden. Only the Avadhanis or the men with the right words could enter it. Also, an Ashvin never leaves his post. And so he waited. The grunts were getting louder. He felt a faint shudder run through the floor –a quivering current of massive footsteps and he knew something was coming. Something big.

  Just as the air grew foul with putrid odour, the Ashvin saw it. He couldn’t scream. His body was seized by abject terror as his eyes registered the glorious impossibility in front of him. He regained his senses in a minute. This was what he had become an Ashvin for. To protect the Sinless and carry out the will of the Lord. All these days he had often wondered on some lonely days, what he would do if one day he had to protect the holy chambers from invaders –the real purpose for which he stood there day and night. Never did he know that he would be the first man standing, protecting the outer towers from something which rose from within the holy chambers like a plague –out to consume the entire world.

  He knew it was futile but he drew his blade. Kalki Commands, he kept repeating in his mind as the great foulness, approached him. It’s naked, scaly and bulked up form towered over anything ahead of it and its sharp spines and fangs were all bared and ready to rip anything in its path to shreds.

  Kalki Commands. He was ready.

  As huge as the monster was, it was also surprisingly quick. In a moment, the kinkar was upon him and the Ashvin saw –for the last time, lying on his back with the hell beast upon him –his stomach being ripped open by huge claws and his guts being pulled out.

  His last thoughts were what he always thought they would be –Kalki Commands.

  The night was alive in the second tower with rampaging Forgiven. Roy was leading the riots. The first thing he had done was to make Kaling tell him where they had stored all the items they had taken from the Forgiven. His loyal katana had been waiting for him there. Leading a group of adrenaline-fueled wasteland survivors was not something he was doing for the first time. He had led small bands of Thuggees all the time during his dark days. But that was different. Now they weren’t out there to steal anything from anyone. They were out to reclaim what was rightfully theirs –their freedom, and in doing so, overthrow a barbaric regime.

  The women of the Forgiven were the first to be freed and then they opened the cages for the other captives. It didn’t matter to Roy, if they were criminals or not. Right now all that mattered was that the Sinless were not the right people to judge anyone. Three of the fellow hunters had carried the General–delirious and burning up with fever– quickly up the tower in search of a medical cabinet. Any of the Sinless they had questioned for medicines and doctors, only spoke of the Avadhanis –the tall men in robes. Apparently, you could find them in the first tower. And the first tower was also where Roy would find the man he was looking for –the Purohit.

  Roy gathered a small team of fifteen Forgiven, nine of them hunters and the rest of them roamers, to raid the first tower. They picked their horses from the stables –serene animals with sloping muzzles. He had picked a brown one with a white muzzle, a thick dark brown mane and strong legs.

  The strong winds blew in Roy’s hair as he rode across the long pathway to the first tower with his fellow Forgiven. This feels far more thrilling than riding a motorcycle he thought. If only Pradeep was here. Pradeep would have handled this a lot better. He was their commander for a reason, Roy felt. The man possessed an effortless ease in making people follow him and leading them. But Roy did not miss the leader in Pradeep. He missed his brotherly friend who would have had his back no matter what.

  As Roy reached midway to the first tower, he could see it. The Sinless running towards them. A counter offensive by the BlueSkins? There were a lot more BlueSkins left than they had anticipated, Roy thought. But they weren’t blue and their heads didn’t look tattooed. And why weren’t they on their horses?

  They were not BlueSkins, Roy realized. They were the common people. And then he understood. They were not attacking them.

  They were fleeing from the first tower. Fleeing from something.

  But it wouldn’t be until later when the Forgiven reached the first tower that they would realize what they had walked into. They had thought that they were taking death to the first tower. Little did they know that death was already waiting for them eagerly at their destination like a hunter in the shadows.

  Vikranth’s fears had returned. Once again his mind had travelled back to the time of the swamp and the towering doom of the Priest Eater and their terrifying God, as he saw the monstrosity ahead of him. He hadn’t had to go to the Yajna mandap to find what Urushi had asked him to find. The object of his quest had itself emerged out of its dark captivity in the mandap.

  By the time Vikranth reached the prayer floor, it was crawling on all fours like a reptile and lunging from wall to wall, roofs to floors, tearing anything and anyone in its path to shreds. Vikranth saw with his own eyes, a priest’s head being pulled away from his body in a single violent instant and then his body being bitten into by the monster and swayed sideways left and right with its teeth, spraying blood everywhere until the legs ripped off and his torso flew away. Screams filled the first tower instead of prayers.

  The voices from the megaphones were urging the Sinless to remain indoors.

  “Stay indoors and pray to the supreme Lord Kalki. Everything will be all right”

  Oh, the lies that come from the skies, Vikranth thought.

  When Urushi had told him about the foul thing that Shukra had created, he had forcibly willed his mind into not imagining it. He didn’t want to see any more kinkars in his life. But he knew now, that whatever he might have imagined couldn’t have been darker or more sinister than what he was witnessing. He drew his blade but he knew what would happen if he attacked it now. He had seen the kinkars long enough to know how quick and strong they were.

  He quickly ran out of the tower. He had to get the Ashvins ready and evacuate the towers. If he was going to die at the hands of a kinkar, he might, he thought, as well save some lives doing it.

  Roy rode against the hordes of Sinless running towards them. The Sinless seemed to not care about them. They were fleeing from something far more dangerous and sinister. Roy could hear faint screams. He exchanged puzzled looks with his fellow riders. It wasn’t until they were too close that they saw what it was.

  It looked like one of the Crawlers that had attacked them at the Nallamala forest.

  Only bigger. Considerably bigger. Quicker too.

  Roy saw it kill three of the Sinless in a blur. The spines on it were bigger too. While the ones in Nallamala had still looked human deep underneath, this looked like its humanity was forcibly yanked away from it slowly and painfully.

  Their horses suddenly skidded to a halt and started neighing uncontrollably as the animals finally saw the danger ahead of them. Roy and his riders could see some of the BlueSkins ru
nning behind the creature trying to hunt it down. Roy recognized one of them. He was what he assumed to be the leader of the BlueSkins. The one that had spoken into a megaphone at the gate of the caves on a dark night under the dark rains. The one that had led them chained into the forest. And from what he understood, the one that the Crawlers had taken away along with them, deep into the forest.

  What was he doing here?

  Two more of the fleeing Sinless lost their limbs. Roy and the Forgiven were now zip-zapping though the Sinless, who were running between the reluctant horses. The earth trembled under the hooves of the horses, raising a fog of dust in their wake into which the fleeing Sinless vanished. The sound of the Forgiven drawing their blades from their sheaths was lost among the screams of the Sinless. Roy pulled out his katana. His fingers gripped the handle in nervous anticipation and strangely, a sense of excitement. Rest of the riders looked at him in surprise as he rode on with a bright smile on his face instead of fear.

  The creature now crouched like a spring and in one giant leap flew into the air and deftly clung to one of the flag poles lining the road from the first tower. It held on to the pole with an arm and its legs and took a bite out of the human leg it was holding in its other arm, breaking even the bone inside with its powerful jaws. It quickly gulped down the piece of flesh it had bitten off the leg, opened its teeth-filled mouth wide and then let out a fierce roar –a dark, deafening scream of rage. Then like a homing device, its red eyes found the riding Forgiven. In two great leaps it was suddenly upon them. Before they realized, one of the riders was no longer on his horse. The creature swooped down on him and then he was gone. Both the creature and the rider rolled away the other way, opposite to which Roy and his party were riding. Roy and the rest quickly stopped and turned back. The BlueSkins had now caught up to them. They were now enemies fighting against a common threat. Their leader quickly looked at the horse whose rider the creature had snatched away. In one swift motion, he quickly and gracefully mounted it and was riding it towards the beast.

  Roy was now riding beside him. They both looked at each other and without either of them fully acknowledging their actions, suddenly nodded at each other. In that instant of survival and the fight for innocent lives, both of them somehow knew that they were– at least for the moment– on the same side.

  Vikranth and Roy rode back into the blinding fog of dust, inside which the dark beast awaited them.

  TEETH AND CLAWS

  The dust was in Roy’s eyes. He squinted hard, trying to look clearly in the fog of dust as he rode into it. The fog was settling down and his vision was slowly becoming clearer. The sounds already guided him as to how far he was from the creature and he did not like what he heard –sound of flesh being ripped apart and being chewed on. Unholy grunts and groans. His unlucky Forgiven brother’s screams though had long stopped.

  The dust was very thin now and Roy could clearly see the beast ahead of him; crouched on all fours on the body from which it was vigorously feasting. It lowered its mouth into the gaping hole in the chest of the body. The ribs were opened up like a child opens up a box of presents. The beast’s face came up from the hole with a huge red chunk of lung caught in its mouth.

  Roy’s grip on the katana tightened. The Crawler had now acknowledged his presence. Its eyes locked onto him as he rode towards it. Roy could see its body tightening, readying for an attack. He lifted his katana, ready to strike, but the opportunity never came. He had underestimated the creature’s speed. Before he could strike, the creature had lunged upon him. He could feel its sharp claws lodging into his abdomen and a sharp pain in his shoulder as he fell from his horse and hit the ground. The next moment he was tumbling painfully on the ground along with the beast in a haze of dust. He could hear the hooves of other horses swooshing past him as they narrowly missed him and jumped over him. The creature came to rest a few feet away. Roy could see it getting up, its jaws snapping and drooling. In a single stroke of its massive hand, the beast struck aside a frightened horse like it was made of cardboard. He knew it was too late. The beast would be upon him before he even had a chance of getting up.

  Forgiven, Forever, he repeated in his mind, preparing to meet his maker.

  It was when the Crawler pounced at him again that he closed his eyes. The last image that burned into his brown eyes was that of the airborne Crawler– its claws drawn out and its mouth wide open.

  The pain that Roy waited for never came. After a moment, he opened his eyes to the cloudy sight of the BlueSkin leader struggling with the monstrosity – digging his blade deep into the roof of the Crawler’s mouth.

  It had been an hour since Pradeep and Veda have found plain grounds. They had travelled west out of the forest. They had hit upon a couple of small towns since then, but had no luck with proper food and supplies. The towns, like everything else in the End Age, were victims of the passage of time, shadows of their former selves – rotting and dying.

  What was once termed as the small-town charm was long gone from these empty places, leaving behind ruins of small stores and houses but no one to even loot them. The Thuggees didn’t care for smaller towns and villages. It was the big cities and the big malls that they loved. The purges hadn’t taken most of these towns. Pradeep pried open the closed shutter of a small medical store. He ran through the boxes of medicines, sorted in boxes marked alphabetically as it usually was the norm in these stores and picked up general antibiotics and some painkillers. He removed the bandages on his face. They were a lot less wet and dirty than the last time but he still wasn’t healing as fast as he had hoped he would. He wrapped up his face with fresh bandages and picked up some more cotton and cloth for future use.

  They were on the outskirts of a town now. There was a ghostly silence everywhere except for the sound of their horse’s hooves.

  “Hungry?” asked Pradeep, offering a cheap biscuit packet they had picked up from one of the smaller stores.

  “It would be way past its expiry date, but it would have to do,” he said.

  “Come to think of it, all of us are way past our expiry dates,” Veda said, taking the packet from his hand. “None of us should have survived.”

  Pradeep was not sure if it was funny or sad. “You sound like you have sinned a lot?”

  Veda chuckled.

  “Sinned enough. At least I hope,” she laughed.

  Pradeep laughed too. He wondered how long it has been since he had laughed.

  “How will we find the others who had left the caves?” Veda asked.

  Pradeep shook his head. “No idea! First let us get to the caves. See if any weapons have indeed survived the fire. We should get there in a day’s time if we keep travelling west.”

  Small houses and their compound walls marked their silent journey. Faded and peeling paint covered most of these walls on which were hand–painted advertisements for various local brands whose names were clever rip-offs of popular brands. Some of the walls though were covered in graffiti of prayers to the almighty Kalki and Vishnu–a last ditch effort by the living to not join the dead, Pradeep and Veda thought. But not all of them were praises to the Lord. On a dilapidated grey compound wall, someone had left the words in green paint –God is our judge. But someone else had crossed off the words ‘our judge’ in bright red and wrote over.

  God is our judge a terrorist.

  If the dust that they were kicking up was not clouding the vision, anyone who had witnessed the battle on the Night of Many Deaths would have said that Vikranth and Roy seemed to be in a kind of strange dance around the Crawler.

  Roy’s speed and nimble footedness mixed smoothly with the trained precision and strength of Vikranth. Roy drove his katana into the wide and grotesque back of the creature while Vikranth narrowly dodged a swing of its claw and dug his blade into its thick neck. Roy rolled into the front and pulled Vikranth’s blade out of its neck slicing it upwards as he pulled it out and plunged it back, right on top of the creature’s hard head. Meanwhile Vikranth quickly
shuffled to its back and kicked hard on the katana’s handle, driving the blade deeper into the creature’s arched back.

  The Crawler groaned in agony. It flailed its arms blindly and managed to catch Vikranth by his arm. Vikranth grunted in pain as its claws dug into his arm like nails. Before the Crawler’s teeth could reach Vikranth’s arm, Roy once again pulled out Vikranth’s blade and slashed the creature on the arm.

  It bought Vikranth enough time to free himself. Roy jumped up using his strong legs and climbed onto the back of the briefly disoriented beast and drove the blade into the white of one of its bulging eyes, holding its jaw up tightly with his other hand and thus pulling its head back.

  Vikranth pulled Roy’s katana from the creature’s back. “Hold still!” he shouted at Roy; and then drove the katana to the base of the kinkar’s lower jaw, slightly missing Roy’s hand which was holding it up.

  Vikranth pushed the katana higher with all his strength, driving it the entire way through the monster’s skull. The katana erupted out of the roof of the creature’s skull barely stopping inches before the face of Roy who was on its back. Blood, tissue and brains erupted along with it and splattered onto Roy’s face. Roy’s eyes widened as he saw what had just happened. Vikranth’s hands shook from all the adrenaline.

  Roy jumped down from the creature’s back, spitting out the blood in his mouth while Vikranth slumped on to the ground on his knees –exhausted and drained. The beast that had haunted that Night of Many Deaths had finally fallen with a huge thud onto the ground.