2424
2424
The Great War was over, but the misery it brought along lingered. For the first time in history, or perhaps post-history, darkness and radiation ruled over the marshlands that had once been known as South Florida. Air, land, and water had turned to poison. Cadavers of oblivious sunbathers lined the sandy shoreline, some of them still under their colorful umbrellas. For most, the end had come suddenly. For any survivors, suffering would likely last until their own final breath. Luck no longer meant what it used to mean.
Yet another mighty empire laid in ruins, its inhabitants still shellshocked after decades of fighting. Brothers had faced against brothers, and orphaned mothers cried themselves to sleep in every street corner. Fathers were no longer fathers. A gray, radioactive cloud blanketed formerly prosperous lands. How the rest of the world had fared was anyone’s guess.
There was an invisible evil lurking in the shadows. The rumors spoke of a heinous crime committed by the enemy in a nearby colony, somewhere where downtown Miami used to be. It was this atrocity that gave rise to the creature, a child of war and despair, born thousands of times before through the course of history. Yet never had it been so ravenous, nor so eager to drag its prey back to the depths of hell for a long sleep that grew shorter against humanity’s lust for power. Its presence was felt all over the land, from city ruins to new colonies sprouting across the marsh.
The creature enjoyed running along empty streets, squeezing into narrow crevices, and jumping from the few rooftops left standing. Its movements lubricated by the suffocating South Florida heat, it flowed through the city with devilish ease, but tired quickly of the solitude under concrete and rotting sheetrock. It much preferred the countryside, where the sorrowful dread of survivors floated in the air.
Only women and children remained under the gray sky. The men had all perished in the fighting. Old people were dying off, but one of them had felt this darkness before, and heard the tales of a headless demon born out of lands soaked in blood and tears.
A frail old lady, long ago forgotten and living alone in her tiny farm, had been there the last time. She had heard the tales. She had felt the darkness. She had been touched by the demon’s unholy spear, and paid for it with her sight. A blind baby, quiet since that fateful night and now nearing two hundred, she had never cried in her life. This was not because she didn’t want to, but because she could not. On most days she’d be called a witch. In times of trouble, visitors would be plentiful, all of them asking her to share “her gift.”
Her gift. That’s what they fucking called it. A curse is what it was, and a terrible one at that, for not a soul could find out. If she were to ever utter a word about it, the seal would be broken, and all hell break loose. That is not a figure of speech. It is the truth. Her silence was the key. The visions were her gift. Hell, the price to pay for even the slightest transgression.
Around her, people were speaking of a great war finally ending. Another one! No wonder it had returned. No wonder they were back to visit her either. And the fighting and killing must have been great indeed, for she had never felt a cold like the one from that winter, nor the loneliness and silence that followed the last bombing runs. Her visions and unholy predictions were on high demand, and people from all over the marsh visited every day, each one looking for answers lost in the fog of war. It was up to her to choose the ones whose lives would sooth the hungry beast, and whose deaths served as a lifeline for any survivors. Choosing had never been easy, but times of war and its turbulent aftermath brought along plenty of deserving sinners.
Thus, on a dark, pale day, an old man showed up at her home, knocking on the door with the petulance that bullies proud themselves of. Knock. Knock. Knock. Knock. How convenient, she thought. Ignorance amongst the young, she could forgive, but the young were dead. It was old men with power that would forever rule over the rest of us. The least someone in her position could do was to tip the balance. For the sake of fairness, she did warn them. For the sake of fairness, they never listened. “Old woman,” they’d say. “Feed me to the wolves of tomorrow, so I can fulfill my destiny today. Show me the futures you see.”
She had met the man outside many times before, despite never having seen his face until that day. Him and his family had ruled over the marsh for generations. They all looked the same to her. They all wanted the same from her. They all died the same through her. “Yes, my lord,” she would tell them. “But know the futures you seek are submerged in the deepest, darkest of waters, and that these depths will claim your life and that of your likeness when the time comes.” And the time had come. The moment he asked his question, the beast could find him. He would see its face for the first time that night, deep in his sleep, too deep for him to remember. The next morning, he would begin a quest for vengeance against those who had yet to sin against him, but who betrayed him at the hands of a witch in the realm of visions and dreams.
The beast had eaten until its belly burst. Then it ate some more, finding plenty of victims on the verge of death in the marshland. Now that the warm, shallow, radioactive pits were empty of fresh meat, it was starving. After doubling, and tripling in size, hiding became difficult, and being seen went against the covenant. Only when they were about to die, could it strike and reveal itself. Timing was of the essence, unless, of course, there is a war going on. In the absence of widespread violence, it relied on a chosen few who could reveal the precise moment a death would occur, or trigger one through ancient chants and invocations.
When would the feeding end? Could a line of old, ruling men outlive her, and if so, who would be there to tame the beast for and against them? Having grown as it did, its long sleep appeared far in the future. Millions of fresh deaths were needed. The time to plan for war seemed inevitable. The best she could do was trim the ranks of those who would bring death and pestilence upon the rest of humankind. How many more would suffice was not up to her, and her visions didn’t go farther than a few thousand corpses.
She knew the beast still had to grow some more and that hiding would soon not be an option. That’s when it would morph into a place and gestate into a new empire. It was there, in the shadows of bureaucracy, that it would sleep, hibernate, and mutate into a smaller, more docile version of itself, one which old men in power inevitably thought they could control. They would set it loose. They always did. She had known so since the moment a dark, headless demon mistook her for a twin sister who didn’t survive, taking her sight and turning a three-day old baby into the last seer of our times.