Rainer
Mama said memories can make you feel happy, but they can hurt more than any mortal wound if you let them. Choose to remember the good over the bad. The bad can consume you, and you’ll become nothing but a memory yourself.
They left as suddenly as they appeared. One minute, we were chasing deer in the woods, screaming like children, and the next, they were off on their surfing stones, heading into the sunset. Literally.
Keary was right. They seemed to like me more by the time they left.
They no longer glared or looked at me suspiciously.
If for no other reason, I wanted to point out that I wasn’t alive a century ago.
It wasn’t me who hurt monsters, though I couldn’t say with any confidence that my ancestors hadn’t.
That’s not the kind of information I have.
I knew my parents. My grandparents were killed before I was born. That's all I know about my family.
Everything we talked about while sitting on the shore the other day continues to move through my mind whenever there’s a quiet moment while we walk. The cruelty of humans just for the sake of it. The cruelty of monsters with the purpose of total domination.
I’m not sure which is worse, if I’m honest—torture because you can or torture for the end purpose of more easily killing off entire species. The fact that these Silence people succeeded in sending some monstrous species into extinction is chilling. Truly and utterly chilling.
Human history isn’t all that different. The 1940s saw an attempt at mass extinction of Jews.
They’re not a different species, which I think might be worse.
That wasn’t even the only or the most recent attempt in human history.
It was just the one that everyone knew. The horror that lingered in the backs of minds.
The one that was recounted by hundreds of books.
Before my parents were killed, I spent a lot of time at the library.
There was a really nice one about forty-minute’s walk from the place where my small family group lived outside Nyc City.
There were several years when I spent hours a day reading history books, primarily because it was the only way to know my own species.
To know where we came from and how we got here.
The problem was there were no mention of monsters at all.
None. Not in non-fiction. Certainly not in history.
It meant that there were no recorded accounts of what took down human civilization.
What I’d found was that the human population was once at nine billion people worldwide.
I doubt there are even a million left alive now.
I suppose when all the people died, there wasn’t anyone left to do something as frivolous as record the events. No one left to print a book. No one to make a record of the events when it was such a struggle just to survive everyday.
We spent the last few days walking through our mornings, heading northeast. This morning, I saw the sign telling us that Fillee was approximately ten miles away, the better part of a day’s walk, so we’re pushing to get there today.
That means Nyc City is about a week or so beyond that. We could come upon the pod that killed my parents at any time.
A hand slips into mine, and I look up from where I’m watching the ground, noting that I could use some new shoes already.
When you walk all day, it doesn’t take long to wear out your sneakers or boots.
These are better than pairs I’ve had in the past, but my feet already ache far sooner in the day than they had when I first put them on.
“What’re you thinking, husband?” Drystan asks.
My heart stutters when he uses that word. Husband. It’s the second time I’ve heard it since the girls were here with their wild antics.
I shake my head. Since we’ve been walking in companionable silence for quite some time now, I figure I can ask a question. “You call me husband like we’re married or something,” I say, trying to keep my voice light instead of letting it reflect how breathless it makes me.
Drystan’s smile climbs. “We use it in place of partner or lover or mate,” he says. “The word conveys the relationship between us without having to explain anything. Everyone knows what husband, wife, or even spouse means.”
“The structure of marriage collapsed when society did,” Notto says. “That’s not to say we can’t have our own little ceremony if you’d like.”
“Did your parents consider themselves married? Did they have a wedding of sorts?” Drystan asks.
I shake my head, shrugging. “I don’t know. I’m not sure if they…” I close my eyes and pull up memories of my parents. I think about everything I observed about them and compare it to what I’ve now experienced with these monsters. What I’ve observed with other human families and couples.
“I don’t know,” I repeat. “I guess I don’t remember them ever being affectionate with each other. I was their center of focus, you know? They made sure I was safe, fed, and had a smile on my face.” A smile lingers on my lips as I remember them.
Fingers touch my cheek, and I open my eyes to find Keary beside me. “You have a beautiful smile.”
I roll my eyes and try to keep said smile from splitting my face. I don’t know how he always makes me grin like an idiot with all the things he says.
“Do you want to have a ceremony?” Drystan asks.
There’s something in his tone that makes me think he does, so I nod. I’m rewarded when his smile becomes almost childlike with excitement.
“Awesome. It’ll be the best. When we’re done hunting the pod, we’ll go back to the base and get married!”
“You know what the best part of getting married is, right?” Keary asks. I look at him, and he wiggles his eyebrows. “The honeymoon!”
Notto sighs. “You act as if there’s something preventing us from fucking all day now.”
“It’s going to be different. Husbands,” he says, smirking at Notto over his shoulder.
I’m distracted as we come to an old street sign. The sign itself is long gone, but there’s a banner hanging from it. It’s white with a human profile. The name Greer is still legible, but the banner itself looks like it’s been torn.
I look beyond it toward a small huddle of huts. There’s no movement. No smoke. No noise at all. I don’t know why, but my stomach drops. A sense of familiarity, sickness, fills my chest. “Let’s go check it out,” I suggest.
There’s no argument as we approach. I keep my hand buried in Kaida’s fur-feathers. Her body pushes gently against mine every dozen steps, reminding me that she’s right there. I’m not alone and she’ll protect me.
We’re still a dozen feet away from it when it becomes apparent that the camp is empty. The little huts are made of what had once been enormous highway signs, bent and folded in such a way to create shelters over two-to-four-foot trenches dug into the earth.
There are three of these huts, with still-occupied clothing lines hanging between them.
There’s a central firepit with large coals that look as if they’d died out from lack of attention and fuel.
There’s a stuffed bear that’s missing its soft texture, its eyes, an arm, and it has a slash through its middle.
Most of the malformations are from time. This missing arm has been sewed closed. The threadbare appearance is because it’s likely decades, if not a century, old. But the slash through its middle?
That’s new.
“There’s still food in this pot, but it’s very, very old,” Drystan says as he stands near the firepit, holding the lid of the pot and looking in.
“Bedding and clothes are still inside the huts,” Keary says just as I see the first signs of struggle. The shuffling in the dirt. A gouge in the earth where someone dug something in.
A vision of my uncle digging his fingers into the ground as one of the monsters dragged him away flashes before my eyes. Chills break out over my skin, and I continue to look around.
There. Right there. The first sign of blood. It’s not much. A drop next to a hat. Using the toe of my boot, I flip the hat and take a step back. There’s a lot of blood in the hat, as if it were used to catch someone’s dripping blood.
I follow the subtle trail of blood spatter. It’s light. Much of it has been lost to time, though not so long ago that it’s missing entirely. It’s still very clearly here. Undisturbed.
The entire camp is undisturbed even though its occupants have vacated. I frown as I realize I know this. Everything about it is familiar.
“A pod took them,” I say. As the words leave my mouth, I see a footprint that isn’t human—neither barefoot nor covered in some kind of shoes. This appears animal-like, but… no. It’s a beast. There’s a strange shape to it, a cross between pictures found in dinosaur books and something canine.
“Yes,” Notto agrees as he steps up beside me. His hand grips the back of my neck in a show of comfort. He’s far more affectionate now than he had been before the library conversation. “They tend to target small human camps. They’re easy pickings.”
I wince. Mine had only been seven. Me, my two cousins, my parents, my aunt and uncle. “Why did they leave us?” I wonder. “I know that one saw me. They met my eyes as we hid within a broken, rotted shell of a truck.” I can still see his eyes.
“That’s a good question,” Notto says. “It’s incredibly unlikely that they’d purposefully leave you behind.”
I’ve spent many years telling myself that that moment didn’t happen. That they didn’t see me. That somehow, our parents hid us well enough that they didn’t know where we were. They didn’t know we were there.
It’s a lie. It’s always been a lie. I didn’t imagine that moment. We locked eyes through the crack in the side of the truck while I watched in horror. He stared right at me for several beats. I remember the way dread curled through my stomach, sure that we were dead. He’d come after us now.
But he turned and walked away, dragging my father’s limp body behind him by an arm.
That’s how the symbol that he wore on the back of his shirt was burned into my memory forever. The circle with three spheres sticking out like points of a triangle. There are two revolutions, reminding me of the old atomic symbols.
Right in the middle is an eye. Not a human eye but something that feels draconic. Chilling. Until this moment, it’s been nothing but a blur, but I remember it clearly now.
“Green and yellow,” I say. “That’s the color in the center of the Silence pod’s insignia.”
I feel like I’m standing outside of my body, trying to catch my breath as the monster’s eyes stare straight into mine. I wasn’t a child. While humans don’t tend to know their exact ages anymore, I was probably twenty or so. I couldn’t be mistaken as a child.
Why did he leave me behind? He should have killed me like they did the rest of my family.
From what I’ve been told, the monsters of the Silence pods have no moral dilemmas.
They’re just as willing to hurt children as they are adults, so it wasn’t me protecting my young cousins that made him spare me.
Notto gently squeezes my neck and rests his forehead against the side of my head. “I’m proud of you for remembering,” he murmurs. “I’m sure that was difficult for you. We’ll find them.”
“Did they kill my parents?” I ask.
“I think it’s probably best if you believe they did,” he answers.
The alternative is torture that I don’t want to imagine.
It occurs to me that maybe I don’t want to find the pod after all. If I find my parents alive all these years later, it won’t be a good thing for them. Maybe I’ve been chasing them for a different, less vengeful reason.
Maybe I’ve been chasing them because I should have died that day too.
“We’ll find them,” Keary repeats.
I want to tell them that we can turn around. We can go the other way. My mission has been misleading. It was me walking toward death. Chasing it.
Survivor’s guilt. I should have died that day too. Instead, I stayed where my mother hid me with my little cousins and watched them kill my family like a coward.
Keary wraps around me, holding me tightly. “What’s happening right now, precious?” he murmurs in my ear. “Why are you breathing like that? What are you thinking?”
“I should have died that day,” I whisper. “They left me alive. They left my little cousins alive, but we should have died too.”
“You feel guilty,” he guesses.
Bile rises in my throat, and I close my eyes as I nod.
“You know why they left you alive?” Notto asks. I shake my head. “Because you were meant to live. You were meant to find your family.”
“I appreciate the sentiment, but not even you believe that,” I say.
Keary laughs. “Called you.” He shoves Notto.
“You know what I think?” Drystan asks. Once again, I shake my head.
“I think that not everyone who’s involved with Silence—then and now—agrees with what they’re doing.
Some have morals, even if they are few and far between.
I think he saw you with those kids and decided to let you go because he didn’t believe in hurting children.
He didn’t bring anyone’s attention to you because they didn’t share his same morals, so he left you where you were. ”
“That doesn’t excuse the bad he’s done,” Keary says.
“Drys isn’t suggesting that. But he’s probably right.
You can belong to a certain group of people because you believe in their bigger picture.
That doesn’t mean you support every stupid decision they make.
That’s the difference between being a blind sheep who follows the herd and having your own damn thoughts and opinions. ”
“There was a woman scientist,” Drystan says, “when I was little. I remember she’d come in and rock us all.
She’d apologize for our existence and what we were going to face.
At the time, I didn’t understand, and I probably still don’t fully understand.
But I think that maybe she agreed that some species were too dangerous to exist—the bigger mission of Silence.
However, she disagreed with the methods they were taking to reach it and their practice of messing with genetics to create more monsters.
Maybe she didn't agree with what they had planned for us.”
I take a breath. Keary’s right. It’s not an excuse, even if it might sound like one. Supporting bad people makes you a bad person. It makes you part of the problem because it gives them power instead of taking it away.
Even if they spared my life, they’re just as guilty of the crimes as their associates. They need to die too. I want to be the one who looks into his eyes as he dies, so he knows that I don’t forgive him for sparing my life because he still took those of my family.