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Dark Earth: Asylum
Posted By: Mark25<mark_price@hotmail.co.uk>
Date: 14 June 2007, 9:30 pm
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Eleven years. It has been eleven years and more than a legion of volatile moons, moons that have sat in judgement of my nocturnal deeds. The current judge and gaoler, resplendent in his wholesome attire, ardently refuses to budge from station.
His throb and ambient monotone glow producing a lunacy that I am, at present, unable to escape. Flashes of my pride's slaughter at the hands of my enemy stab through my mind's contemplative silence. I have taken to mutterings and occasional idspeak. Insanity cannot be far away.
I traipse along the dirt path with my ear and voice borrowed out to bad company and with only the intermittence of birdsong, howls and scurrying to interrupt our telepathy. Birds and animals desperate to escape the same nocturnal madness as I. The last fourteen miles through acres of farmed land and bordering forestry have all been in an effort to be at my destination before dawn.
The small ridge gives way to a tidal wave of dingy huts: Insanity. The village barely stands as a shanty town and by contrast of the luxurious sky-rising cities our fathers lived in, is deserving of its surreal title; this human jungle is little more than a hovel an animal would refuse to crawl into and die. Still, the extinction order on our species has rescinded, allowing us to survive on a planet we once called our own. Giving homo sapiens the chance to pick up the pieces of a shattered psyche.
From my sporadic encounters with these towns, it is rightly suggested that we are indeed, little more than animals. All the men do is drink and speak forlornly of the bygone days of their youth, thrusting their genitalia in the direction of any passing female. Little point if the limb in question is predisposed come inebriation. Former hunters that are now pigs, minds rotting in nostalgic filthy sties with only seasonal rutting routines to shake them occasionally free; seasonal meaning those rare occurences when the beast is sober enough to take advantage of a chance erection.
The females for the most part do their best to set us above the common mould and begin anew the quest for civilised society. Aside from maternal duties, they gather and organise everything from the planting and rotating of crops to the bartering of equipment with nearby villages. Harvested grain is once more the currency: the arteries through which mankind survives.
I am led this way by a blood trail, the one child I could not bury alongside her mother and the rest of my party. Our dwelling, along with everyone barring the girl, were torn into shreds. The boy left hanging by his feet from a nearby tree, the scratches upon his knees a bloodstained lilac. Throat opened like a zip and bearing a gaping hole, an effigy of ritual slaughter much like my own.
Just as disturbing were the foetal remains I buried along with the girl's mother, her eviscerated belly sheathing an infantile body punctuated by several stab wounds. Hands no bigger than my thumbs. It has taken eleven years and many dreamless nights to erode the cliffs of visceral nightmares from which I cling and suffer plenty, it will take many more for them to disappear.
I am no longer tormented by the morality of destroying my enemy's children, in fact, I have on several runs slaughtered entire houses of them. Experience has taught me that some of the adult creatures can sleep through thunderstorms, allowing me ample opportunity to leave one of them alive, waking up into a world of horror and carnage. Opening their eyes to see the lifeless gaze of a partner whose warmth and presence had frozen and left them hours before. A dwelling where at every turn they are confronted with walls smothered in the blood of their loved ones. 'Vengeance is a right,' the words left at my camp and written in their native tongue, flicked on every walled surface with clinical exposition.
Gone are the days where I would kill them for food, now I do so for pleasure, it pleases me to see them in the throes of agonising death. Though I know it is even theoretically impossible, I imagine each and every one of them present at my pride's torture: their laughter in the face of the boy's frightened cries and his mother's throat-filled pleas. The constant throwing and kicking of the girl's mother as if she were some unwanted toy. The crying, the stabbing, the gutting. They will pay for every imagined sound they have wrought upon my scarred mind. I cannot define my anger at what they have done, but they will pay for it with their lives until mine ends.
Villages have recently had a population limit introduced that must not be exceeded, so my presence here will most likely be unwelcome. The three ornamental creatures patrolling the town's lanes were easy enough to avoid without being seen, let alone questioned for identification at such an hour. My only hope lies with an old friend, a forgiving old friend.
Knocking on doors is a relatively new idea to me and I shuffle nervously from one foot to the other as questions resurface in relation to our departing words.
"Who the fuck is that at this time of the morning?!"
Perhaps in lee of being woken up at three-thirty, it's understandable for him being a touch annoyed.
As I continue to shimmy, a guard rounds the corner at the end of the lane. Though their eyesight as a species is poor, their stafflight makes up for any optical shortcomings in darkness. It looms like a giant aqua-cyan eye, hovering some three metres above the ground. There are no gardens or obstructions to speak of, so looking down the lanes leaves everything and everyone exposed. With luck, the other two are at equal distances from this one. Should the need suddenly arise for an act of speed, violence or both, that distance will grant me excellent leverage; unless of course, my friend should open the door and make himself accessory.
The door opens as the guard spots me and issues a short grunt of an order.
"You there, be still and await my command!"
He is only a fraction into the lane and already the wheels are turning in regards to the positioning of his fellow soldiers.
"P-Paul, Is that you?"
I am just as taken aback by the clean and somewhat domesticated appearance of one of my old hunting troupe. I flash small squinted eyes to the encroaching cyan light and he recognises the danger.
'I had nowhere else to go.'
Along with the glaring beam, I hear the heavy trudging of the guard's demeanoured approach. It comes to stand less than two metres away, meanwhile its friends must be continuing their rounds and gaining on our position. Striking now would allow me a fast escape, but the corpse would leave my friend with some very awkward questions.
"Face me for retinal scan, human."
The knife's gleam, breaking cover from my cloak is caught in my friend's eye as he steps backwards in the doorway, objecting furiously.
"Face me for retinal scan, human; you will not be asked a third time."
I already know the result, so why wait for the conviction.
DJ steps out from the doorway and hustles me aside.
"What is this, officer?"
The two begin a small altercation, bursting forth a mirthful revelation.
"Mayor Judason, this human was loitering on the perimeter of your domicile; do you know of him?"
"Why of course I do, I-"
"Then he must adhere to a retinal scan for proof of census."
The bleep of a hidden retinal scanner sounds out as it catches my left eye as I peer over my shoulder at this sorry exchange: the forceful master and the bumbling slave. The guard looks over Dean and stares right at me, mandibles moving in mock puppetry of lips.
"You are not registered for residency and are in violation of the human settlement act. You will come with me."
My friend knows that the creature has only a few seconds left to live and reacts with almost poetic timing.
"Actually, that's what he came to see me about."
The creature's head never moves from my direction, while the weight of the beady black eyes slowly fall on the shoulders of my friend.
"Yes, see, he wants to apply and what with the waiting list en all, he decided to come to me. Beats awaiting trial and detention for non-compliance, right?"
The guard does not seem overtly impressed by the ruse, but a sweetener evidently helps.
"How's your companion liking that cider?"
The guard's eyes drift between us both, as if contemplating some difficult moral conundrum. A silly, naive human churned out as another settler that will not further his career, or more drug of choice. Hardly the most stifling of moral decisions. The guard acquiesced, preferring instead to propagate his chemical romance with one of mankind's oldest creations. Though the males refuse to admit their love of sweeted alchohol -and it is considered offence to ask, mind; females have been known to bathe in the puerile egg-stink.
"The preliminary completed form shall be with me by midday."
"That it shall, officer, that it shall."
The guard walked on as the beam from his compatriot's stafflight shone towards us from the opposite end of the lane. The bastard blatantly ignored the dispense of a goodbye from my friend, I didn't even offer the sentiment to be denied.
The front door lingers open behind me as I begin my attack.
'He called you: mayor.'
My saviour continues to have his back to me as I breathe in a good picture of the ageing warrior from his appearance and grotty surroundings. I note the turn of his head with a finger across the lips as a warning of company and hush my tone somewhat. The rectangular room squats at little more than two metres high, four wide and eleven long. Separated seven in by a large black woollen blanket that I presume hides the bedroom. Lined along either wall are two symmetrical windows, the right side of which have acutely angled rays of earth's eldest watchguard. The left side displaying only his most enduring of beams on the following property. There is a small wooden enclosure, like an upright coffin, made more conspicuous by the fact it stands against the wall directly between the right side, light-letting windows. I presume it to be the toilet, the thoughts of mangey, yet hygienic spring up one after the other. Especially compared to the more natural rigmarole that I endure.
My friend has gained significant weight to instruct a lifestyle change and now heaves his weight from one foot to the other in steps to get where he's going. Such is the time-honoured fall from grace that has shadowed all human beings: contentment and stagnation. He stands no taller than five-eleven, stocky, with a bulbous weight around his waist on the verge of devouring his entire torso. He seems no longer built for the rigours of heavy work. Thinning brown hair, slicken back with the occasional wily grey refusing to stand with the small herd. A nose hammered and flattened over to the point of a separate direction from his face, nostrils as if under constant plunder and shaping by large toes rather than thumbs. A thick and bristly moustache created from rebellious nasal hair. To consider him contender for world's ugliest mammal might offend his fellow contestants. Still, we were friends once on the hostile lands our birthplace has become. A friendship that has withstood the greatest clashes of ego, but not always for me: that most essential of human fibres.
A short, gentle jab into where his ribs should be makes light of his ignored weight problem.
"Certain responsibilities, certain perk- hey, cut that out."
He returns a similar shot, lifting what accounts for my shirt to reveal the poor state of being at the other end of the survival spectrum.
"Never figured you for anorexic; you look like death incarnate."
'I'm lithe.'
I retort.
'Built for distance and purpose: and you?'
"A libido furnace."
He slaps his stomach, producing a giant of a sound.
"This here's fuel for a sexual dynamo. One slap and I'm banging for hours."
He's disgusting but his quips have always been confidently funny. I snort a small laugh in bravo of such inane titilation.
A stirring from behind the curtain produces the voice of what sounds like a child.
"Who is it, darling?"
From what she says, I am most obviously mistaken.
"No-one, honey."
"Well, tell no-one to keep his voice down, he'll wake Isabelle at his current rate of tone."
Chastised but expected, I pull my lips in, spreading them across my teeth in a half-grimace and repeatedly tapping my left index finger over my mouth in exaggerated spankings.
It seems almost childish but I can't help myself, I question again in more jocular seriousness.
'He called you mayor.'
Dean reaches the safety of the fridge and opens its rusted door to reveal a cornucopian distraction of stored food.
"Someone has to take the lead. You look famished: what would you like?"
My eyes linger a second too long on the options and he quickly changes tact with an even greater hushed level.
"We're out of Sangheili children, I'm afraid."
It is the dark earth whose cruel plains I would rather not traverse and a sorry legend for which to be remembered, but tit for tat, his remains the worse of the two. I throw the considerable weight back at him, maintaining the indirectness of an otherwise excellent assault.
'Any human flesh on the menu, I hear on good advice that it has that certain je ne sai quois.'
I recognise in his eyes and I'm sure he sees in mine, the admittance that neither of us are saints in our struggle for survival. The long list of crimes against others that he is happy to forget, compared to the long list of mine that torments the hours and weeks of restless sleep, are the burdens that sustain us and break us. The flickering refridgerator light opens up a loud and malignant rhythm between us.
"Someone had to take the lead."
Sixteen men, women and children with the same food shortage as us, against a horde of fifty and not the least chance of being asked to join our clan. The decisive factor in my abandon of them as feral; as being less than human. Relinquishing their status as a species borne to a morality that set them apart from the kingdom. Even less than an animal. Animals do what they must to survive, they take all that they need for the immediate future because the immediate future is all they can see. Man changed all that. In his infinite wisdom and rationalising conscience for all his deeds, he was more than happy to commit acts of atrocity against his fellow man. Safe in the knowledge that come the morning, his conscience might well be long clear through dream and interpretation: intepretation that he, and not his victim, belongs to the higher purpose. Wars have been fought over smaller differences than the gulf that yawns between us, and yet, our friendship endures.
"Why have you come here, Paul?"
The light flicker draws to a close and the sound harps like a heart monitor grinding out its final few breathes.
"Is that what's been bothering you all these years, the childkiller come to exact a kind of revenge?
I have only the truth to answer with, I dare not give voice to the moral arm of his crimes as he mine. The war of words sixteen years ago remains at stalemate. Given my circumstance, I know better than to sound the horn for battle to resume.
'I'm in search of a girl that I knew once.'
Dean's stance changes, he closes the fridge door and folds his arms defensively; a little late but nevertheless.
"She get away? Run out on ya?"
Our link as old friends is a cruel, if honest one.
The scouring of the land for the last body to bury, the night after night of sleepless dream to the point of being unable to picture her face. The lure she made, the happiness by proxy that she crayon over my excuse for existence. He needn't know of my yearning for closure. I couldn't look after her now, but looking for her, seeing her comfortable, will make my last act in these conscience-strangling days so much easier to accept and perform.
'Not quite.'
Though the front door is closed and I have found sanctuary from the moon's lunatic pull, an odourous pus is already seeping from old, related wounds.
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