Brief Intro: this is the first entry in a series of stories set in the not too distant future. It is dystopian in nature, but as a reflection of my own inner thoughts on despair, hope will always remain.
This entry is from the perspective of an adolescent boy named Gilain and his first interaction with the Priests of the New World. What happened to the old world? Who are the Priests? I guess you will have to tune in weekly to see.
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Part 1: Loud Mouth
Fear can take the man, but it can never finish him. Only the death of hope can do that. A sharp blade can do the trick also.
I was a boy, hardly twelve years old, when the Priests came for me. My parents did not protest. My father sipped winter ale with the chief Priest D’slecter, as his apprentice, a younger man with dirty hair and lanky arms smelling of sweat and death, took my readings.
A scan of my head followed by a blue light. A scan of my chest followed by a blue light. Every blue light followed by a grin and then a nod shared between two ghoulish fellows fixated on my body.
It was exciting at first. We didn’t get to see tech like that in the Skirts. Best we had were the water reclaimers that roamed the crops. Giant, bulky beasts that howled throughout the night pulling in moisture from the air to spray life onto the soy and corn during the summer.
My mother cried in a side room out of view, but in the end there were no goodbyes. There were no good lucks. There was an exchange of ninety-three credits. One for every pound of flesh the priests purchased.
Then there was a brown cloak with a blue armband and a forty mile walk toward the Winterlands with three other boys in brown cloaks and blue armbands.
The old world didn’t die as they predicted it would. The new one didn’t grow as they claimed it should. Damn Priests didn’t get any of it right.
I had been through my third year of schooling when they came for me. Schooling– that’s what they called the shack at the edge of town. My first year, when the spring rains came, I thought it was going to blow away and leave me cowering in my chair with no cover. I still cried out for my mother back then.
The storms would last for weeks. It was the only precipitation we saw until the winter snows. Trenches had to be maintained to drain the waters so they didn’t flood and ruin the crops. My father called himself a farmer, but really he was just a glorified ditch man. They didn’t trust him to work the machines.
After the storms came the heat. An unbearable scorch that brought unquenchable thirst. Rivers dried up and water had to be sent from the cities. What the reclaimers pulled from the air, by royal decree was spared for the crops. It was a royal edict for the people if there ever was one.
The educator, Ms. Weise, said it came from the oceans– the water sent by the cities. “Little machines pull out all the salt and make it drinkable,” she drew a picture on the chalk board of how it worked. Mostly squiggles and lines, but to a child’s eyes everything is a masterpiece.
She was nice enough. Twenty-something, with a sweet voice and a heart full of the kind of hope our parents abandoned long ago. She was no artist, but I listened to every lie she told with a smile on my face.
She was born in Eulanta, the center city, and I think she had dreams of bringing civilization to the rats in the Skirts– that’s what the civilized folk in the cities called us. If the dark cloaks had been taught by her the world wouldn’t have turned out as it did.
We walked by that schoolhouse on the way out of town. The chief Priest D’slecter, an unusually tall, slender man with strands of gray hair dangling across his face and blowing in the wind, looked at it and scoffed. “No more need for those, don’ow why these rats keep ’em ’round,” he said, staring at me with a peculiar grin.
I just looked away and kept trudging along. “If you ever see one, don’t look him in the eye,” my mother used to say. She never got around to explaining what to do if they snatched you from your house. I guess she was just clinging to the hope that I was a normal rat, nothing special.
We scurried about our daily lives out of thought and out of sight– and out of luck. The question of where their food and bread came from didn’t register in their minds so long as they never felt the pain of wanting.
It was late summer when the Priests came. The days were shorter, still hot, but with just enough luck at just the right time the crisp wind blowing out of the northwest onto your face could make your hair dance with thoughts of Hallow’sween.
As I looked in the other direction I saw Bren, the first girl I ever called a friend. I met her before we started at the school. It was in a field of flowers surrounding the apple orchard on the other side of town.
We called it an apple orchard. It was one tree that sometimes sprouted something edible, and sometimes not. Mostly not.
The flowers that surrounded the tree were no better off. They drooped and clung to life through the measly drops of water the mothers spared from their rations. “Life is beautiful, we have to take care of it, even these little things,” mine told me.
The first time I saw Bren I was dumbfounded. She was smashing blueberries and rubbing them into her dress. She said the color was pretty. I thought so too.
I’ll never forget how her mother came yelling across the field. “What are you doing, stupid girl,” she cried out as if Bren had just murdered the family cow. I thought she just really cared about that dress. We all came to learn that the color blue was off limits– only for the Priests.
Bren waved at me with a sad look on her face. We’d seen one other boy taken by the Priests a few years before. He never returned. No one spoke his name after he left. His mother disappeared that winter. Some said it was grief; some said it was shame. After that his father moved to Eulanta alone.
We didn’t know much about the cities except that they housed what remained of civilization after the calamity. Only the parents of the selected were permitted entrance. It was supposed to be an honor, but after they were gone the rest only spoke their names in whispers, with scorn.
The only other way out of the Skirts was with a brown cloak and blue armband. We were taught that the cities were full of businessmen and aristocrats, people that made the new world turn. Eulanta had a royal family watching over them. We just had the old lands and we watched over each other.
“Are we going to Eulanta,” I made my first mistake of the day by asking.
The young Priest walking beside the chief pulled a metal rod from his side and hit me in the back with it. “Rule one,” he said coldly with a smirk, “never speak unless answering a question.”
“You will never see Eulanta, boy,’ the chief Priest D’slecter added with emphasis. “We are taking you to a place where you can learn to be something more, if still not human.”
“Are we not human,” I made my second mistake by questioning.
Two more hits to my back followed before I could take another breath. “We won’t be carrying you there,” the second Priest said, “if you dont learn the rules, you might as well die now. Either way is fine by us. One more soldier, or one less rat. Doesn’t make a bit of difference.”
Sometimes hope isn’t lashed out of a man, it pours out like water from a glass turned on it’s head.
After about five miles we made it to the river bridge. None of us had crossed it before. Bren and I once came to it. She joked about running across and into the Dead Forest to disappear.
I thought the idea was dumb, though I’d never say it to her face. They called it the Dead Forest because everything in there died a long time ago. The trees were half fallen husks holding each other up. What the war left behind, the storms couldn’t claim and the Earth didn’t want.
“What is your name,” the chief Priest D’slecter looked at me and pointed. His finger was thin and looked as if bone itself.
“Gilain, sir,” I answered right away.
The second Priest struck me with the rod again. “Don’t lie to anyone with a blue armband, loud mouth,” his voice was monotone, uncaring.
“Sir, that is my name,” I hunched forward trying to reach around and rub the spot he struck.
Two more quick strikes. I fell to the ground. The other boys just watched. Their eyes said they wanted to turn around and run. Their knees quaked and refused.
“Are you calling me a liar, loud mouth,” the chief Priest D’slecter said, but it wasn’t a question at all. He hadn’t moved, just stood there with a piercing gaze that wrestled with my soul.
“We gave you the blue band, but you’re still a rat,” the second Priest chimed in and then sighed, “your name is Loud Mouth from now on, boy.”
I looked up directly into his eyes. As he extended the rod again, my gaze shifted and in the distance I saw Bren– a blue dress.
“My name is Loud Mouth, sir,” I yelled out, trying not to cry.
I waited for the strike with my eyes closed and my body straining forward. It never came. After a few seconds that seemed like an eternity, and finally finding the courage to look, I saw the group walking forward.
“Don’t make me tell you to hurry, Loud Mouth,” the second, younger Priest yelled back to me. He tapped the rod against his leg as he walked.
Bren was no longer standing there. Probably turned back. Probably on her way to forget me. Maybe she was one of the exhaustion mirages the old men talked about after a mid-summer day in the fields.
I stood and hurried back to the group. Rule one may have been to keep my mouth shut. Lesson one was even harder: survive.
Rushing to catch up I tripped and caught myself on one of the other boys. There were six of us in total, counting the Priests. I was the smallest and I found the largest one to brace my fall.
He hardly moved when I fell into him. It was like being braced by a boulder. Brushing the hair out of my eyes and looking at his arms and chest, I understood why. He towered over me.
We were at a crossroad. I turned back and looked. A quaint feeling of loss stirred in my stomach. The road split into three other directions.
“We’ll wait here for the other two groups,” the chief said. He didn’t look happy as he continued, “the other two groups are behind schedule.” They were the words of a man whose time you did not want to waste.
“You rats can talk if you find it pleasing,” the second Priest said, “just keep it down.”
The boy I crashed into lowered the hood of his cloak. The silhouette of his face became clear and I recognized him. His father had brought him to town the previous summer to trade coal for food.
“Rafe,” I said softly, almost as a question.
He looked at me like I was a fool. His face wrinkled and his eyes pulled together as he strained to search memories. I’d have thought him struggling to take a shit if he weren’t standing upright.
“They named me Scar,” he whispered.
I hadn’t noticed it until he mentioned it. When he’d come with his father I don’t remember him ever lowering his hood. From his left eye, partially hidden behind his pitch black hair, and down his cheek stretched a deep scar that curved to his lip.
“Stop staring,” he said, frustrated.
“I meant no offense, Rafe,” I replied.
He shoved me, agitated. “I told you, it’s Scar, Loud Mouth,” he proclaimed while pointing to his blue armband.
The boys in the towns thought it brought respect. They looked up to the ones taken. The mothers and daughters cried and despaired for what the boys considered a high honor.
I never cared too much about it. I was young, but it did not matter. I wanted to live a simple life of peace and grow up farming fields like my father and his father.
I would marry Bren in an autumn celebration at the dance hall. We would have children and they would farm and marry Bren’s of their own. A peaceful life for peaceful souls.
“You can be Scar, and I will be Loud Mouth,” I stepped forward, “but that band makes you my brother, right? My brother’s name is Rafe.” I did not care about the armband, but I knew boys like him did.
I held out my hand. He stared at it intently. After a moment of thought, he took it and we sat to stories of our families.
His father was a miner at the town a few miles west of ours. I had never visited it, but Bren’s mother spoke of a beautiful waterfall off the path there. She told us that at the right time of night during the rainy season, God brought a beautiful bow of light across it.
The town itself was no bigger or smaller than ours. A dainty school. A small grocery and all purpose store. A tavern where the men would drink after work. A dance hall where the mothers would meet and sometimes drag their husbands and children for parties.
All the towns in the Skirts were the same. Just big enough for the rats to survive. Just small enough for the cities to ignore.
They were all separated by just a few miles. Each served a different purpose. Each offered something to the cities for its right to exist.
I told him I wanted to visit Eulanta. He laughed at me and called me a dreaming idiot. Told me Eulanta was for important people, or the toys of important people, and I was neither.
After a bit more waiting, the Priests threw a bag in front of each of us. It was long and black and made of cloth. Inside of it were a pair of cloth brown pants and a brown shirt with two buttons on the neck. It was exactly how they were dressed, except for the color– and the weapons. They each had a revolver on one hip and a dagger on the other.
“No weapons,” one of the other boys loudly pointed out with a frown. He was overweight and his face was oblong in the wrong direction. His hair was cut short and you could see the dirt where he was constantly wiping sweat away.
The second Priest removed the rod from his side again. One hit to the gut of the boy, then another to his back as he fell forward in pain. The sound he made was like air being forced out of a balloon after the harvest festivals.
“You just broke rule one and rule two, Sweaty,” the Priest said, standing over the boy.
“Rule two,” the chief Priest D’slecter said, walking in a circle around us like a wolf toward its prey, “I will only say this once. You do not need a weapon. You will learn to be a weapon or you will die.”
Most of us were raised by farmers, miners, or masons. Few of us had ever seen a gun, let alone fired one. None of us had fought or killed something larger than a rabbit. They expected us to be weapons– what a joke.
“Don’t worry, Sweaty. I’ll make sure you live to your heart attack,” the fourth boy suddenly spoke. His voice was high, but muffled, like speaking through his nose into a scarf. He had been quiet until now, taking everything in.
He moved closer to Sweaty and tapped his hand to the boy’s chest. “Don’t touch me,” Sweaty protested, nervously standing upright.
“Not like you have the balls to do anything about it,” the other boy replied, circling.
Rafe stood silent, still slipping into his new shirt like not a thing was happening in front of him. Before I had the chance to move between them, a loud cracking sound rang out. It echoed in every direction.
“Looks like this will be a lively unit,” the chief Priest D’slecter proclaimed with the revolver smoking at his side. A grin on his face from ear to ear revealed broken and missing teeth. The man seemed more like a wild coyote.
“I think we will call this one Twitch,” the other Priest called out from a few yards away, pointing at the boy that had been provoking Sweaty. At the sound of the gun, the boy had crouched into a lunging position. His head was twitching back and forth, surveying where to strike first, just like a cornered snake.
The Priest showed us four pieces of parchment that had been removed from the chief’s backpack. Paper was rare in the Skirts. Most of us couldn’t read. None of us had to say it.
“Worry not on what it says,” the Priest said, looking each of us in the eye as he handed it over, “just keep it on you.”
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