Thoughts on the Void

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.

——————–

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. 

This is part 2 of The Hymn of the Skirts. It continues on from the perspective of one of the boys in Loud Mouth’s group. The world has changed much in the time between now and when this story takes place. What was on the paper given to the boys? What is the goal of the Priests? Let’s find out!

——————–

Part 2: Twitch

Vengeance is the right of every living being that has suffered. The ancients often spoke of their rights at length. Hammurabi’s Code. The Magna Carta. The Constitution. The Free Folks Agreement.

All weak declarations of a pitiful people with vision but no strength to hold onto it. My great, great, grandfather watched the last free city burn. He stood on the hills and felt the heat on his brow. The smoldering ruins perfectly reflected what humanity is capable of.

It was a great bedtime story for a father to tell his child, and it’s been passed on ever since. He said it would serve as a reminder of all that was taken from us; it would be the foundation for a future where we don’t make the same mistakes. Instead it just pisses me off.

I ripped the sleeves from my brown shirt. Priests never said anything about a rule that I needed sleeves. To hell with their sleeves.

They plucked rats straight from their mother’s arms. I bet they had to pull Sweaty away from his kicking and screaming. Makes me laugh thinking of the slurping noise as he slipped from her grip, like a pickle you squeeze too tightly pulling it from a jar.

He was right to worry. He would never be a weapon. By the God in the sky or the one in the ground, I swore the second I saw him I would kill him myself if he got in my way.

He stared at me like a rat watching a snake. “Get a good look, Sweaty,” I spoke with what my dad would’ve called a shit eating grin. 

Bastard drank his weight in booze every night. Gave him just enough strength to beat up an old lady and a little boy. Never enough to own up to it the next day.

Most families in the Skirts followed the norms. Work, rest, sleep, and work. Lucky me to be born into the one that worshiped the God in the ground.

The God in the sky offered hope and love. He welcomed prayer and promised peace. The God in the ground brought fear and suffering, and only accepted blood and pain as an offering.

Most of the men in our village worked the mines, but my family was the odd one out. We lived at the town perimeter– where the gray rocky ground gave way to splotches of yellow grass. It wasn’t good ground, but it was good enough.

Cows. Pigs. Sheep. We raised them just to slaughter them. I killed, skinned, and gutted my first cow at the age of five. On the Great Wheel, the strong decide when the spinning stops, and after hearing that story for the first time, I decided I would be strong.

All the meat went to the cities, of course. It was a royal edict for us to live off rations supplemented by wild rabbits or wolves– whatever was left alive in the Skirts that wasn’t tainted by the calamity.

There was a brief period during the spring rains that turtles and frogs overran the village and became a reprieve on our dinner plates. It’s a lie that frogs taste like chicken, but frogs are far better than gruel and mush. Everything is bland here.

“Shut up and keep on the lookout,” the younger priest said like it was a warning. I’d like to see him pull that rod out and swing at me.

I was always on the lookout. I didn’t take a step without knowing the next. With each new one I felt more alone. If this was to be my unit, I would be just as on my own as I had been in the village.

Leaving the town they took Loud Mouth from, I caught a brief glimpse of his schoolhouse. Looked just like mine, but it seemed he got to use his. A long time ago the fathers and mothers in my family decided they would either educate us themselves or not at all.

Of the lessons I learned during the few lucid times my dad saw fit to educate me, perhaps the most important of all was critical thinking. “Believe what you experience and can prove, not what you are told,” the old man used to say when he wasn’t kicking my ass.

If life was about learning lessons, my bloodline had been poor students. The great, great grandfather that fled the riots and the culling that followed the droughts and the famine, had every opportunity to set us up for success. He was right not to trust the authority, or the Priests emerging to prey on the people, but so very wrong to escape so far into the wasteland we would never dig ourselves back out.

Fear is the enemy that beats you down without ever lifting a finger. I made a promise to both Gods that it would never cripple me. So, I set about to notice all I could and give myself the best chance at taking advantage of whatever the wheel offered.

Loud Mouth was small, but seemed smart in the way naive children often were. Sweaty was large and feared the sound of his own breathing, which was so loud we might as well have been walking up the road yelling, “Here we are!” I couldn’t read Scar. Was he strong? Was he just a body with no brain?

I remembered him from the village. We were from the same one. It’s not like I had friends, but I hardly knew him. Always kept to himself and followed his dad around like he was on a leash. 

He got that scar three winters ago. The snow came out of nowhere. They said his sister was trapped under the collapsed roof of their house for an hour before he freed her. 

All it cost him was his smile. The packed snow beneath him was crimson when his uncle lifted his face off of it. A piece of railing he’d pushed off his sister shifted as she moved away. The metal had its vengeance.

“You’re nowhere near the lives you knew,” the chief added. Of course we weren’t, asshole, you purchased us so we could pretend to do God’s work of killing other rats in other lands.

Funny, they always tell you it’s for God. If God needed someone dead, you really think he’d leave it up to a brainwashed old fart wrapped in a black cloak or a scared shitless little boy draped in a brown one? If that’s what God needs to complete his work, Heaven is just as screwed as we are.

“Why do you think they had us start moving so cautiously,” Loud Mouth posed the question as a whisper under his breath like the Priests couldn’t hear. The small idiot just couldn’t shut up.

“Maybe we entered enemy territory,” Sweaty answered. He was huffing and puffing. His new brown shirt was already soaked through. 

“What enemy? We aren’t even twenty miles from home yet,” Loud Mouth continued to whisper.

The younger Priest turned in a flash and struck Loud Mouth with his closed fist. Straight to the nose. As he hit the ground, the boy sounded like one of the dead sheep I used to cut up and toss to the side. 

Before any of us had time to marvel at the young Priest’s speed, or the fact that the hit didn’t knock Loud Mouth out cold, we caught our first glimpse of the enemy. They were about two-hundred yards in front of us. Moving parallel with the road, but about twenty yards off of it. 

After moving past the Dead Forest, the road had mostly been a barren desert of rock and dirt. Snow covered mountains lurked on the horizon, but they were at least a day’s travel away. The roads were weathered, broken and chipped. Deadweed tore through in patches.

Deadweed was thick, brittle, and grew about a foot off the ground. Good luck if one of the thorns cut you. It was hell trying to get the bleeding to stop. My grandfather said it didn’t grow before the calamity. It was a byproduct of the war and the broken environment caused by it.

One summer I ran away from home, about four years ago. Dad was on another bender. Broke mom’s jaw that day. Threw me into the toilet and my jaw chipped a piece of it off. 

I slept in a patch of deadweed that night. Cursed at the stars wondering who the hell named it deadweed. When I woke up I looked like I had been in a knife fight.

“There’s six of ’em,” the chief said. 

Loud Mouth picked himself off the ground and knelt down studying our position. There was a ledge to our left, dropped about six or seven feet into a patch of heavy deadweed. It spanned about ten yards or so in front of us. 

“This is the place,” he proclaimed. I hated how sure he was of himself. 

“To hell with that,” I replied, “let’s just hit them straight on.” I was ready to fight something. Must have been the part of dad in me I just couldn’t escape. 

“If we go back the way we came, we can go around them,” Sweaty chimed in, wiping his forehead again. 

Before I had the chance to tell him how absolutely worthless he was to the group, Loud Mouth spoke up instead, “No, this is the place.”

The Priests moved behind a boulder near the road, not saying anything. The younger one sat on the ground and stared with a blank look. The chief leaned against it, he had a slight smile on his face like this was the moment he’d been waiting for. Did they plan to let us fight on our own? Seemed like a waste of credits to me. Sweaty was surely dead. Probably Loud Mouth too. 

“Loud Mouth has a plan,” Scar finally joined the conversation, “let’s give it a shot.” His arms were crossed and I couldn’t tell if he had a single thought running through his mind. His strength was definitely a bonus to the situation, but so far he seemed like the type to take any order given regardless of its worth. 

“Rafe, I need you to sneak around on our left,” Loud Mouth started explaining. I was surprised the Priests didn’t strike him again for using Scar’s old name. “You need to be seen once you’re on the other side of it,” he calmly continued.

The boy may have been small, but I could tell by how calm he was that he was either an idiot, or he had balls of steel. I hadn’t decided yet, but if Scar was listening, it was worth a try. “Alright then,” I said.

“Twitch,” he looked at me. His eyes were cold, but focused like he wasn’t the same stupid boy asking stupid questions. “Once they’re in the trap, tear them to pieces.”

I didn’t know why, but I was smiling. I knew these kids well enough to know they were mostly useless, but it was a real smile on my face. The kind of smile from love or hope– things I’d given up on. My blood was flowing and it felt good.

“Sweaty,” Loud Mouth abruptly turned and scared the boy. I thought Sweaty shit himself from the surprised look on his face. “You have the most important job. After the first few fall, one or two will likely see the trap. You need to rush out and push them over the edge.”

I really liked the cut of his jib. The smallest one of us had me believing it could work. I didn’t care which God he believed in, there was fight in his eyes and demon blood in his veins. Not a lot of that remained in the Skirts.

The Priests still just sat watching. None of us dared question why. Was it a test? Did they just want to see if we’d all die or not?

I seemed to be the only one that could read. I thought it strange that the parchment we were handed only said, “I survived the trial.” Was this the trial?