Fallocaust (The Fallocaust Series) (4 page)

The beasts’ heads would come up to your chest in height if you actually got a chance to compare their size to yours. They were mostly grey in colour, though a few of them were lighter, and a few black, all with sporadic patches of hair on their bodies. All the radiated animals had trouble keeping fur on their bodies, they were mostly covered in scabs and thick scars from scratching their irritated (and irradiated) skin. I had never seen any animal besides the block’s cats and the crossbred deacdogs that didn’t have this problem, the radiation was fucking horrible on all the surviving creatures,

“Well, Killian,” Greyson said with an encouraging smile. “I’ll open the gate to let the deacons into the feeding pen, your job is to remove the wooden barrier and kick the rats into the pen. Reaver can watch you.”
“Seems... simple enough,” the boy said slowly but he sounded unsure. I smiled, I liked hearing how motivated he was to learn shit around here finally, thought he was going to be a useless book head forever.
I watched carefully as Killian removed the wooden plank that blocked off the gaping hole in the concrete barrier. There was a four foot high barrier of medians and pavement slabs that topped off all of the concrete walls of Aras. It kept the brats from falling into the deacons’ territory and it made a perfect rest for when you had to snipe someone; it also made a good shield as well.

He grabbed one of the binds of the first rat and shoved him towards the hole. The rat started screaming of course, jabbering in his gibberish language. He was blindfolded, gagged and bound, but his ears still worked and I knew he could hear the dogs below him.
Killian dropped him right by the hole in the wall, and started to savagely shove the rat through the hole with his foot, wasn’t doing a half bad job of it either.

We were all used to dealing with the sub humans, but some people had more trouble feeding the deacons than others. They still resembled us in some ways, and it did make some of the more cowardly weak people uncomfortable.
I watched as the rat dropped to the ground with a sickening thunk, and as he moaned and twisted around I could hear the rusty screech of the gate open.

As the decons charged towards the rat, the other one, a female, dropped on top of him.
The deacons made short work of them. They barely had time enough to piss themselves before the whole pack descended like flies on honey.

In a flash the rats were dismembered and each dog who had gotten a limb had run out of the feeding pen back into their main territory. The others that remained were chewing on the rest of the carcasses, snarling and snapping at each other.
I heard Killian shudder, from the corner of my eye I could see him looking away from the carnage. I kept watching, I found it entertaining for some reason. Yes, I know I’m sick in the head, but I had seen countless people and animals being torn apart and it didn’t bother me like it did some people. I don’t remember a time where it did bother me. I’m sure Greyson and Leo probably have memories of me being a blood soaked two year old laughing at the rats’ throats being ripped out.

I still laugh at that.
“Thanks for the help, Reaver,” Greyson said behind me.

I looked up from the feeding pen and started following him down the ramp to the main road. By this time the people of Aras had started to gather around the truck, waiting to get their meat handouts. I didn’t like being around a lot of people so I grabbed my ration of meat and started heading down the road to my house.
Once again, my senses honed on Killian. A part of me wanted to run up to him and ask him what he thought of his first time feeding the deacons, but I couldn’t bring myself too. I just watched him from a distance, like I had been doing for quite awhile now.
My thoughts travelled though, and I started thinking about the merchants that would be coming into Aras sometime tomorrow. I didn’t know from which direction they would be coming from, but I knew it would either have to be from the south or the west. I couldn’t see it being the south though, most of the time only mercenaries dared to venture down the south road. The same road that would lead you directly through the factories and labs that everyone stayed away from like it was a plague.

As I walked on, trailing behind Killian, I noticed that I was scowling. Funny how the thoughts in your head can so easily translate themselves into your physical self. I was scowling because the mention of the factories and labs in the south greywastes reminded me of what went on in those places. The factories were a necessary ‘evil’, and I put a flair on evil because that’s other people’s opinions not mine. I don’t see the factories as evil, they’re what feeds the lot of us and it saves a lot of people the mess of having to butcher themselves. Especially smaller groups, ones too small to have their own stock.
In my block we butchered rats ourselves, but in other areas of the greywastes the factories processed the rats for the consumer. They processed and canned the meat themselves through the King’s brand Dek’ko, a company which distributed a lot of greywaste conveniences. They processed bred and captured rats, and had many different products, ranging from regular meat, to soups, all the way to a delicacy called
fois ras
, which tasted good, but the  process to making it would make a normal man’s stomach turn.

That wasn’t the reason for my scowling though, no, the reason I could feel my hands clench was because of the laboratories, and the laboratories reminded me of the king.
What I know of King Silas is what I have been told. I have never seen him, heck I’ve never so much as seen a picture of the asshole but I knew what he was about; I knew he ran the greywastes.

He controlled the greywaste economically, because he was the only person with the means of mass production now, and he also controlled the wasteland by sheer force. He had a large army under his belt, and countless thousands of loyal legionnaire soldiers.
The greywastes and beyond were vast though. I didn’t know how big it was, mostly because I didn’t care, but what I did know was that it was huge. He kept us segregated in three groups: rats, who were dark skinned from the radiation, dirty sub humans that we farmed as food. Ravers, who looked more like us, but had never been chipped or had lost them, so the radiation had driven them crazy to the point where they were dangerous, and usually shot on sight; and arians, the normal human race.

Arians were well, all of us, the sane ones, we were the ones that King Silas had decided to leave alive when he took over the greywastes. We were supposedly his people, and his property. When an arian baby is born, he or she is implanted with a small tube like thing called a geiger chip. It has a substance in it that filtered out the radiation, and more advance versions gave you vitamin supplements.
In order to keep track of us, every few years the king sends out Mercers to take the census here. They come in the south direction, because of course they don’t have to worry about the labs because they’re probably buddies with the Skytech scientists operating them.

The Mercer comes heavily guarded by scum sucking Legion soldiers, briefcases in tow, checking up on every cluster of arians they can find. The last time they came, was only a couple years ago, before Killian and his parents had come here. It was the first time I was present during one of these things, usually Greyson and Leo made me leave for a few days. They didn’t like me around the Legion, for obvious reasons (like sniping them for fun).

It was my first encounter with anyone close to King Silas, and it was the day I realized that there was some authority in this vast greywastes and that it did indeed affect my life. I guess before the Mercer came I had been pretty well shielded from that sort of thing. I had always known he existed, we liked blaming him for things and I had heard stories about him from Skyfall refugees. But I had never had anyone under his influence in my life, or my territory besides seeing the occasional soldier.

I followed Killian from a distance as he made his way to the house he now lived alone in. He was half a block up from me, on a quiet cul-de-sac, about five minutes away. A big three bedroom two story house that was much too big for him to stay in alone, but he seemed to want to remain there. Memories and all that I guess. Though Leo had told me the place had been a horror house before his parents had been taken to quarantine. Maggots and body fluid everywhere. The kid had been trying to take care of them himself. We were all shocked he hadn’t ended up dead with them.
I watched as he went inside, and listened to make sure he locked the door behind him. My mind started to wander, like it most often did. As I sat myself down on top of an abandoned car a few feet from Killian’s house, I remembered back to the day two years ago. The day I first encountered the Mercer, the day of the census.

It’s a long story, but it was an important moment in my life. Part of me wished I could be inside telling the story to Killian over a beer or something, but I shrugged off that idea as quickly as it popped into my head. One day maybe, but for now... I was comfortable lurking in the shadows.
I leaned back against the top of the abandoned car, and lit myself another quil, I inhaled deeply, and as I looked up at the clouded sky, night was starting to fall, but I felt compelled to stay outside of Killian’s house for a little while longer.
I inhaled again, and with the warmth of the opiates seeping into my veins, I slipped into my own head.

Chapter 3

Reaver

Two Years Previous

The ever present background music that played throughout most of the populated parts of Aras cut out with a crackle and was replaced with static. I had been napping against a stack of supply crates on top of a shed when the disruptive pop jolted me out of my light sleep. I opened my eyes for a few moments to gage my surroundings, and once I judged that there was no immediate harm to myself, had closed my eyes again; just as Greyson’s voice crackled in the speakers.
“Block meeting, attendance mandatory.”
Greyson’s deep voice could be heard.
“Five minutes to gather. Once again. Block meeting, attendance mandatory, five minutes. That is all.”
I stretched a bit and decided that it was pointless to try and get back to sleep. The town was going to be full of residence in several moments and I had enough trouble sleeping under normal circumstances.

I opened my eyes and stretched with a yawn, feeling my bones crack and pop. When I was limbered up I got up and shifted a few crates around to make myself a crate throne, before I sat on top and waited for the people to gather.

The square was nothing special. It was a cleared area in the center of town, with shops and alleyways surrounding it. The shops which looked like they might have had some beauty at one point had boarded up windows and doors. The paint had long since peeled away and the exposed brick was cracked and crumbling with the mortar almost completely gone.

All the brick houses and shops were like this, but they were still one of the more favourable shelters. The brick may have been ugly but it was durable, and kept the weather from coming indoors. Most of the residences lived in either brick houses, communal living in a modified factory since the metal was solid, or in one of the two livable apartment buildings we had in Aras.

My house was brick and off to the west, far enough away that I didn’t have to see people if I didn’t want too, but near enough that I didn’t have to sleep with one eye open.

Scanning the square, my eyes fell from the boarded up store fronts, and the alleyways filled with debris, back to the fountain in the middle of the square. This was the main hub of Aras, Melpin’s bar was here, and Reno’s uncle Carson had a shop and we had some other stores too.

The fountain centered the square. It was as big as a car in length but was circular, it was made out of a smooth marble type material that had a smaller circular slab on top of it. It used to have a third smaller slab stacked on the second one, but it had been removed a long time ago. The reason behind it was because long before I was born, when our people’s grandparents were looking for a place to settle down, they found a large pipe going deep into the earth, eventually to water.

With some digging and some knowledge of earth, or water finding, or whatever, they managed to make the fountain into a well. This was our only water source, and we guarded it with our lives, me especially. If any diseased rat escaped from the cellar and tried to drink from the well, it could poison all of us, heck I’ve even had to shoot a couple of our own people who tried to get a drink after they had come down with the disease. Didn’t sweat it though, they were as good as dead anyways, I just spared them the agony.
I continued to watched the square fill up with the various residence of Aras. The music on the radio had started up again, and was now mixed in with the low murmuring noise that comes when a bunch of people are talking all at once. They trickled in, chatting amongst themselves over whatever mundane unimportant things waster idiots talk about, all clustered around the fountain.

This sort of action, clustering around the water source, always reminded me of a group of heard animals; grouping around the waterhole reinforcing their social bonds because to them there was strength in numbers. And keeping everyone happy with you was a good survival strategy. Anyone who knew me for more than several minutes would be able to tell that this was not my strategy. I was a solitary predator, not a heard animal, and reinforcing social bonds was about as important to me as drinking arsenic.

I heard a loud thud and a shifting of metal and looked behind me to see Greyson. The shed was only a couple feet from the second story of the old apartment buildings a lot of the others lived in. The easy way to get on top of it was to climb onto the balcony’s railing and jump. I looked past him just in time to see Leo hop from the railing onto the tin roof.
“Looks like everyone’s here,” Greyson said, he looked over at me and grabbed one of the crates from the stack I had been resting on. He placed it on the edge of the roof, and stood on top of it. He cleared his throat and addressed the residence.
“Thank you for your attendance,” he started. I rolled my eyes.