So far the boys of our story don’t seem to be enjoying the time they are spending with their new masters. They don’t really seem to be enjoying each other. Twitch seems especially hostile. Loud Mouth can’t make sense of the situation. And Scar has the emotional range of, as Loud Mouth eloquently described him, a boulder.
Before the Priests purchased them, they had to pass a few tests. The paper given them, though not all of them can read it, seems to hint they are still being tested. What is the trial? Will they all survive it? Where are the Priests taking them? Let’s see what happens next.
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Part 3: Dozer
Fear is the great protector. My grandfather was sure to drill that lesson in. It keeps you safe and grounded where baser instincts like rage and love would see you to an early grave.
Three weeks and I couldn’t recall the sound of chirping birds. The waves rolling onto the shore of the pond beside my house seemed a lifetime away. I hated every step that led from home. There was nothing alive in the Skirts that did not will itself to be so with a strength I did not possess.
The Skirts– we were taught about the place in class. The smell inside that four story building was something I could never forget. It was like a skunk had eaten bad eggs.
Three of the four walls were actually one-way windows to the outside. If you were looking in all you would see was a reflection of yourself inside an advertisement supporting the King or the Priests. Looking out, the city bustled. Merchants in black and brown suits accompanied by machine servants of many different types walked clean streets of temperature monitored concrete.
The teachers said the smell was from a chemical to strengthen the bonding of the metal that held up the edifice. It improved the connection of the steel to the weight bearing frame. Something invented after the calamity– or before it if you had the money. They said we’d get used to it with age. I never did, though I longed for it under the hazy skies of the Skirts.
Loud Mouth had walked by his schoolhouse and his eyes shone of regret. They didn’t even teach him to read. The kids back home used to say I was no better than a rat. I hated them for it, but it wasn’t until seeing the towns with my own eyes that I fully appreciated what I lost.
The Priests told my parents I would be fine. If I went with them the collectors would be held at bay for at least two months. It was a blue-light deal my father could not pass up.
I’m not entirely sure how I passed those tests. What were they scanning for anyway? Not like they’d ever tell me.
The younger one laughed with every beep as I flinched and pulled away. I think he was just as surprised it lit blue as I was. Most of the kids get red lights and are sent on their merry way.
Eulanta was filled with either powerful people, or people pretending to be powerful. Unfortunately for my father, pretending was expensive. It only cost one child at a time.
I wasn’t the pick of the litter. After the Priests finished their scans I kissed my brother and sister goodbye while memories of their red lights and failed tests poured through my mind. Fear and luck are seldom friends.
My mother cried in the side room. Listening to Loud Mouth ramble on, I guess it was the same for us all. Thinking about it made me miss the smell of her hair– like the lilies growing in our garden.
“What do you mean run out and push them,” I said while wiping sweat from my eye.
“What the fuck do you think he means,” Twitch interrupted me, throwing his arms around in frustration. He looked like a skinny, flightless bird. “Damnit, just let me do it,” he pleaded with Loud Mouth.
Twitch liked to curse a lot. I don’t know why. He tried to hide it behind a rough facade of passion and wit, but he was probably the best educated of the group. I could tell by how he carried himself.
I knew plenty of boys like him back home. They were all capable enough, but so insecure they had to prove it to themselves they could be strong. All of them trying to live up to one family legacy or another and earn the praise of a father that didn’t remember they existed most of the time.
“No,” Loud Mouth answered him with all the authority of a Priest, “he can do it.”
I couldn’t put my finger on it, but something wasn’t normal about Loud Mouth. He was different from Twitch and Scar. After we picked him up it was like he alternated between three separate personalities: the whining child clinging to the past; the questioning rebel with one foot out the door; and the stoic soldier tightening his grip on his dagger.
A dagger– none of us had one, because the Priests didn’t think we needed them. “You will learn to be a weapon or you will die,” the ghoul said. We were dead already. Nothing walked through those lands that did not escape the gaze of Death.
It was two hundred miles they brought me. The transition from civilization to wasteland happened in the first twenty. After that there weren’t even weather beacons hovering through the sky. No one needed to know or change the weather out there.
Inside the city I must have been scanned about a thousand times daily. Drones buzzing my eyes to check identity. Cameras on every street logging my location. Even those commercial bots– the little ones that tied into the system and knew who you were and how much credit you were worth.
My knees cracked together as they sat me down in a tiny waiting room that might as well have been a tomb. It was the last piece of civilization they expected me to see. Everything about Richard Bryley would be buried there.
The cities hadn’t survived the calamity– they rose from the ashes funded by the profiteers of despair. The old world still clung to life, if by fingertips alone, but outside the walls of one of the seven cities life wasn’t life. It was something else.
One button and the Priests deleted all records of my existence. “Now you’re a real rat,” the younger one said as he motioned for me to walk on, “don’t worry, you’ll have the same opportunity a rat has to find worth in life.”
I was more afraid than I’d ever been. Each step was met with a new extreme. Every twenty or thirty miles there were signs of the old world. Ruins of burned up cities, the once long ago bastion of civilization, littered the landscape like cinders dropped onto a paper map.
I wondered how many souls wandered those scorched streets. Did the dead remember a time before the wreckage? What did they fear more: the bombs and bullets falling from the sky, the retreating government that could not protect them, or the God that sent the sun to burn away their sins and beckoned the Earth to bury the evidence.
At least the city had vehicles. “Walking will be good for you,” the younger Priest had said, trying not to laugh. “You know how scarce gasoline is. Batteries don’t take to what you’re about to see either. We ain’t going to waste ‘em on rats.”
Drones flew overhead every now and then, likely carrying water or food to one of the drop-off locations in the Skirts. Just another reminder that nothing lived on its own merit in the wasteland.
“Focus,” Loud Mouth put his hand on my shoulder. It was like he was trying to push his own clarity and resolve into me. “I trust you,” he said looking into my eyes.
What was with him? Why did he have to say that? “You trust me,” I repeated back, stumbling over the words not knowing if I was questioning him or agreeing.
“Y’know he’s going to get one of you killed,” Twitch laughed with all the confidence in the world that it wouldn’t be him.
“I trust you too,” Scar said with a deep voice that echoed into my soul. He had been a man of few words, but whenever he spoke, God was it important.
Before he even finished saying it he was off across the road. Even crouching he looked like a boy of normal height. That’s what the maid used to call “corn-fed evolution.”
Loud Mouth pulled his hand off my shoulder and clenched his fists. He wasn’t afraid. There was no doubt in his mind.
Twitch laughed hysterically. I do not know how the other group didn’t hear it. Perhaps they did and thought it was just a hyena. Perhaps even mistaken, they would have been right.
“Let’s do this,” he said, smashing his fist into his palm.
As the group ran to us, it became clear something was off. Their clothes were the same as ours, only tattered. It was as if they’d already been in a battle.
The first two fell, just like Loud Mouth said they would. The screams and cries poured out of their mouths as easily as the blood from their bodies that the deadweed dug into. Their skin peeled and flayed.
I couldn’t move. I knew my job, but every instinct I had told me not to. The fear kept me safe. It never pretended to care only to abandon me later.
Then I heard him and my blood bubbled in a way I didn’t know possible. “Go now, Dozer!” Loud Mouth yelled. It was a battle cry that broke through my walls. Though my brain told me to ignore him, my heart leapt out of my chest and pulled my feet forward.
I smashed into the two still at the top of the ledge. One of them was bleeding from his ear and lip already, the other had scratches on his hands and face. I aimed for the center point between them and crashed my stomach into it.
They tumbled down and screamed out. Before my mind could catch up to my body I felt a rush of wind blow past me. The crazed laugh of a hysterical boy diving head first over the ledge drowned out their cries.
Twitch threw his fists into anything and everything that moved. His arms tore open from the deadweed, but he wasn’t bothered by it. He just kept laughing. Even after they stopped moving, after they stopped screaming, he kept laughing.
Scar, who had been throwing rocks at them from the other side of the road, made his way back to us. Loud Mouth sat there looking up to the sky as if to ask, “Is this what you wanted?” Twitch dug himself out of the deadweed with all the elegance of a bear gnawing its own leg free from a trap.
“Loud Mouth, I never would have guessed it would be you,” the chief said with a pleased look. The Priests finally stood and moved from the boulder. “My credits were on Scar or Twitch.”
As they clapped their hands and moved closer to us, I noticed four other Priests walking toward us. They were walking from the direction the group we just fought had run from. They were also clapping.
“None of it matters,” Loud Mouth said– the whiner was back. His inspiration and calm faded and was replaced by a child again.
The younger Priest struck him with his fist once more. Loud Mouth hadn’t even stood up yet. He tumbled over and held his hand to his jaw.
“Don’t worry,” the Priest said, holding out a hand to help him up, “we’ll bring the demon out of the rat.”
As Loud Mouth stood to his feet refusing any help, the other Priests made it to us. “Seems you found the one this time,” a tall one said, pulling down his hood. His face was pale and scarred by burns.
“I guess these are yours,” another, smaller Priest said while holding out more pieces of parchment. “Not that any of you can read, but you need three pages to get into camp.”
“Beyond the fall. I bring death. I survived the trial,” I openly read the parchment.
Twitch laughed, “What fucking irony.” Blood was still draining down his arms. His new brown pants had been torn to shreds.
A third Priest, who had not removed his hood, threw a new set of clothes and cloaks onto the ground in front of each of us. He was different from the others. His armband was thicker and the other Priests seemed to keep their distance.
“Don’t worry, he’s safe. At least for now,” the chief said and then pointed at the new clothes. They were all black. “Put those on; you’ve earned them.”
“Let’s go find out how much more than rats a Loud Mouth, a Twitch, a Scar, and a Dozer can be,” the younger Priest threw his hood back up and began walking the road in the direction of the mountains that lurked on the horizon.
The other Priests followed him and the chief yelled back, “Don’t make me tell you to keep up.”
We each grabbed our clothes and did our best to dress while running forward. Loud Mouth continued whispering complaints as if the Priests weren’t hearing them all. Scar didn’t say a word. Twitch sulked as if the ending of the battle was the loss of a best friend.
The first trial was over. The next one was at the end of the road winding through the desert. Fear is all I had ever known and I feared the end of that road, but as we walked on I heard chirping overhead. I realized some things did have the will to exist in the wasteland. As I listened to them hum the hymn of the Skirts, I pondered if I too had that inside of me.
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