Paragenesis: Stories of the Dawn of Wraeththu (29 page)

“What about you?” I asked,
whilst pulling on the bathrobe and fiddling with a half threaded
belt.

“I’m going to try and buy us
some more time.”

It took a search through four
labs before I found Jeaki’s corpse strapped down in the operating
theatre. Judging by the pen marks and yellow disinfected area on
his smoothly tanned abdomen, the doctors had been about to remove
some organs. I went cold, realising at last exactly how
contemptuous my ‘employers’ had been. We specimens had always been
fully expendable.

Any last sympathy I’d had
evaporated like morning mist. If the humans wanted to cut each
other to bits, I didn’t much care; but Jeaki had been one of us,
and they had no right.

*We’re coming*
I sent to
Ash, pushing Jeaki’s gurney out into the corridor

Just as I reached the Nayati, I
heard someone shout, and a second later an alarm was sounding. I
could hear running feet and the click-clack of guns being
primed.

“Ash?” I asked, realising with
a sinking heart that retrieving Jeaki had taken me too long, and
that the borrowed time had already run out.

Ash grinned again; only this
time I sensed the ruthlessness that had made our species so feared.
I was reminded yet again that I knew next to nothing about him,
other than those few brief glimpses of his soul. Ashlem har Unneah
wasn’t some pampered corporate son like me. He’d probably been
fighting for his life, long before someone incepted him.

“Put him in that circle,” he
said pointing at a space surrounded by invisible symbols.

As I finished offloading Jeaki
I heard a sound and turned. Stanislav lunged through the door.
Instinctively, I took a swing at him. His head whipped around with
a sickening crunch. I’d just killed my first human. What shocked me
was that I felt no more empathy than I would if I’d stepped on a
cockroach.

Ash closed his eyes and raised
his arms. A moment later the blinding mind-light of the Nayati’s
patterns exploded outward. Thunder crashed around us as if a
thousand lightning bolts had hit. On the floor, Jeaki’s body
spontaneously combusted, filling the room with the smell of roast
meat.

“What just happened?”

“I let all the electricity in
this building escape,” Ash replied. “It’s in its nature; it always
wants to return to the Earth Spirit.” He looked exhausted. “Every
piece of electrical hardware in the building just fried itself.
Anyone within six feet of a computer, a phone or a light fitting is
seriously crispy around the edges.”

I must have looked grey; this
magical elimination of life felt deeply wrong, even if they were
humans. It bothered me in a way that snapping the guard’s neck
hadn’t.

“Don’t give me that look,”
snapped Ash. “The police already shoot us for being streetscum. If
the authorities understood what they’re really dealing with, we’d
be facing genocide. This lot were getting far too close.”

“But the research, the
fertility problem…”

“If they’re not breeding,
that’s a bonus,” replied Ash coldly. “I know this is harsh, but it
really is us or them. That means we can’t leave the slightest clue
that they ever created a Wraeththu here.”

I had to concede he had a
point.

An hour later I stood on the
front steps of the Calcutt Institute, watching the flames beginning
to take hold. The evidence was burning, all the files and disks
thrown to the hungry flames.

I pulled on one of the
backpacks that we’d looted from the CGS barracks. It wasn’t going
to be easy on foot, but I felt relief to be getting away; away from
the all-pervading medical stench of the Institute, away from the
dead with their accusing eyes, away from my human past.

I couldn’t help thinking that
there would be consequences, despite the removal of the Nayati. The
deaths had been too easy and something in me said that there should
be more to it, like karma or something.

“If they know we’re alive
they’ll expect us to head for Unneah territory in Chicago,” Ash
said. “But I think it’s time we spread out to the smaller towns. We
need to start tribes everywhere we can reach.”

I nodded in agreement.

Another dream flowed into my
mind, far sharper and more precise now that I was fully
Wraeththu.

Running through the trees, pine
needles tickling the soles of my feet, twenty of my best hara
running with me…

“We should head south,” I said
with absolute certainty. “My dreams never made sense to the old me.
That’s all changed now; I totally get it. I’ve dreamed all my life,
wonderful dreams, Wraeththu dreams. My future is filled with
mountains and the scent of pine. Starting from here that means we
go that way.” I pointed.

“South it is, then.” Ash
replied “A wise har always pays attention to his dreams.”

You Can Never Go
Back

Christopher Coyle

I fled. I had no choice. My
skin felt too tight for my body, a fire burned in my stomach and my
head pounded with a violence threatening to send me spiralling into
oblivion at any moment. I turned from the terrible tableau
unfolding before me and pushed my way through the teeming mass of
bodies, uncaring of who saw my face or who I had to push aside. The
stench of their enjoyment mingled with the sickly-sweet scent of
viscera and squeezed its way past my clenched fingers to fill my
nostrils with its cloying perfume.

The heavy door to the room was
only a temporary impediment. A jerk of my wrist, the application of
my shoulder against the door, and I was outside. The cold, moist
air hit me like a fist, but it was a welcome relief from the
oppressive heat in the examination room. I inhaled deeply, my hand
falling from my face so that I could breathe in the night air. But,
even outside, I could not escape what I had seen. Even as the door
slammed shut behind me, I could still hear them talking excitedly
about the body they were examining.

The stranger had stumbled into
our village shortly after midday. He mumbled something before he
collapsed, but his words quickly suffered as all such does from the
wagging tongues. He lay there, untouched, for almost an hour after
he fell, for my people were too afraid of approaching, mistrusting
that the demon had truly fallen. Then they descended upon him like
vultures, swiftly carrying his body to my father’s house. Besides
being the village’s leader, my father also tended to the physical
woes of the villagers. That was when I first caught sight of the
demon, when they carried his limp, unresisting body through the
door and laid him down upon the table.

My curiosity drew me over after
the others had left to find my father. At first glance, the
stranger looked dead, except for the occasional, shallow rise and
fall of his bare chest. Only a pair of tattered, ripped pants
covered his lower body, showing a map of burns and bruises
crisscrossing his torso. It looked like he had been struck
repeatedly with a burning brand.

It seemed impossible to me that
a demon could be burned, much less be as badly wounded as the
stranger had been. Once, he must have been truly beautiful, for
behind the bruises and scorched flesh of his face, you could still
see the ghost of his former grandeur. His hair had escaped the
plaits it had been braided in, tangled with twigs and leaves and
hanging wildly about his injured features. Immediately, it was
apparent that he was one of them. One of the demons from the
south.

Hesitantly, I reached out a
trembling hand to touch him, to see if he was flesh and blood.
Before I could touch him, however, the door burst open and my
father stood there.

“Get away from him, Jarren,” he
barked in a tone that brooked no disobedience. Pulling my hand back
so quickly caused me to stumble backwards, leaving room for my
father and the men who had carried the stranger to crowd in around
the table.

My back against the wall, I
watched with morbid fascination as my father began to work upon the
stranger. The stranger’s pants had to be soaked in water before
they could be cut off of him, for they become crusted with blood
and ichor from wounds that had not been apparent before. The moment
that my father had removed the stranger’s pants completely, it
became immediately apparent to them that the stranger was truly
different when my father stumbled back with a startled exclamation
and one of the others yelled out in disgust. Apparently, I had
realized far more swiftly what the stranger was before they
had.

The demons are built
differently than people. Their bodies are different, somehow
combining aspects of male and female anatomy to create a set of
genitalia that was fascinating, at least to my gaze. It was obvious
the others in the room did not share my fascination, except my
father.

He took the other three men off
to the side, gathering them together as he whispered something
urgently in a low voice. I probably could have listened in, and
looking back, I wish that I had, but I could not tear my attention
away from the fallen demon before me. No, he wasn’t a demon. If
anything, I thought of him as an angel who had been through
hell.

“Jarren, stay here,” my
father’s voice broke the glamour I had been caught in. As I looked
over at him, his face was serious, but there burned a strange,
curious light in his eyes.

“Watch the demon until we get
back,” my father continued as he and the others left, leaving me
alone once again.

Bemused by my father’s rather
abrupt disappearance, I stood there against the wall, unsure of
what to do. I probably would have stayed there until my father
returned if the demon hadn’t groaned out loud, his eyes fluttering
open as he looked around in confusion.

“Where am I?” he mumbled softly
as his pale, pale eyes finally settled upon me. I felt trapped by
those eyes. They were a translucent jade and surprisingly sharp for
someone who had been unconscious moments before.

“You...you’re in Kreslow,” I
stuttered, unable to look away from the stranger’s eyes.

His brow furrowed in confusion,
but the stress upon the burns on his face caused him to grimace in
pain instead. He tried to push himself up, but even before he
raised his torso, he groaned in pain and slumped back against the
hard wood of the table he was laying on.

I reached forward, pressing my
hands lightly against his chest, trying not to cause any more pain
than he must already be in. “Please, rest. My father will be back
soon. He can help you.”

The stranger shook his head,
“No, he cannot...” Suddenly, the stranger’s voice broke off as he
was caught by a fit of choking. The blood flecking his whitened
lips frightened me, but I tried to smile reassuringly as I brushed
his hair out of his face.

“You’ll be fine,” I tried to
reassure him, but I don’t think that he heard me before he slipped
back into unconsciousness.

I tried to make the demon, the
angel, more comfortable, using a cool cloth to cleanse some of the
crusted gore from his flesh. Before too long, my father returned. I
heard him at the door and I dropped the cloth guiltily, backing
away from the table as he came through the door. Whatever I was
about to say, the excuses that were ready to spill from my mouth,
was silenced by the crowd following my father. On all of their
faces, I could see a grim determination fixing their faces into
rictus masks.

They ignored me as they pushed
into the room, my father leading the way to the body upon the
table. He was dressed in all black, the clothing that he wore only
when he was about to use his knives to bleed someone of the
sickness within their body. My suspicions were confirmed when he
pulled out the black leather bag that was his most valued
possession. The black bag that held his knives, his needles, and
the other tools he used for physicking.

What happened next will haunt
me for the rest of my life, a nightmare I shall never be able to
free myself from. Using an extract from a rare weed that rendered
those who breathed its fumes in a sleep that bordered upon death,
my father ensured his “patient” would not awaken. Rolling up his
sleeves, he opened his black bag and pulled out one of his knives
and began his grisly examination upon the demon.

The rational part of my mind
realized that my father and the people of the village were
terrified of the demons that had been increasing in numbers over
the last decade. Where we lived, far in the north, we only heard
occasional rumours from the southern cities and the news was
frightening. My father and the other village leaders must have
determined that this was the best way to find out about the demons,
to learn what makes their bodies work and perhaps to find a way to
fight them. To them, the stranger on the table was a monster that
had to be studied and analyzed. To me, it was something surreal, a
scene that one would expect to see only in Hell.

I had witnessed my father work
before. I had even assisted him on occasion, but this time, I could
not detach myself from what was happening. This time, something was
different. It bordered on sacrilege and my heart cried out at the
injustice unfolding around me. I looked around, desperate to see if
there was anyone else there who I could turn to for help, who might
understand. In each face, I saw something that scared me almost as
much as the sight of my father elbow-deep in viscera and blood.
Eagerness, anticipation, and an almost sadistic satisfaction at
seeing a demon brought low gleamed from every face. That was when I
knew that I had to escape. I had to get out of there. Let them
believe that I was a coward, that the sight of so much blood had
sickened me.

After I left the room, I
wandered aimlessly along the street, not truly caring where I was
going, just eager to put as much distance between myself and the
others as possible. I had always felt like an outsider in the
village, but no more so than at that moment. Right then, I just
wanted to get away from everything and everyone.