Snowflakes drifted down from a low bank of muffling clouds. They caught in the stuttering glow of a streetlamp before disappearing into the freezing legion that covered the sidewalk. It wasn't quite dark yet; muted grey light threatened to break through the clouds on the western horizon. It was already a cold evening. Night was sure to be hell.
Aren pulled his coat closer to his lanky frame and brushed a hand through his unkempt dark hair, sending snowflakes flying in every direction. On his nose perched a pair of thin, wire frame glasses that seemed to fit his shallow face perfectly. Two eyes gleamed brightly behind the scratched glass, icy blue. The kind of eyes that belonged everywhere and nowhere all at once. The eyes scanned the street before him an a grim indifference; a year ago, the sight of this many bodies would have sent him to his knees, retching. Now, he just shifted his grip on his short wooden spade and took a step off the curb.815Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ8j2kEDZcIr
The first corpse was that of a man, his face picked to an unrecognizable mess by coyotes and carrion. His tattered white dress shirt held innumerable crusted bloodstains and barely hid the gruesome lacerations that crisscrossed his sunken chest. A portion of spongy goo that looked suspiciously like intestine spilled from the man's gut and lay smeared across the pavement underneath him. Aren stifled a disgusted cough and grabbed on to a mottled arm, giving it a solid tug. The frost that sealed the body to the pavement sighed and cracked, relinquishing its grip with a crunching sound. The corpse was surprisingly light; nothing was left below the waist. He adjusted his grip on the stone cold, decaying arm and heaved the whole gory mess into a lawn adjacent to the street. The body flopped into a shallow snowdrift, sending up a cloud of fine powder.815Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡnC7uzT7aEe
Without missing a beat, Aren straightened his glasses and turned back, reaching for another corpse. This one was a child, between the ages of five and seven by the look of it. Aren couldn't tell if it was a male or a female; long, filthy hair spilled across its ruined face in the trademark ill-kept way of the Wanderers. The child looked small and fragile in death. Aren tried to avoid looking into the ghostly face as he gently picked the bloodied body off the pavement and carefully deposited it into the snow next to the man. It's gruesome and thankless work, Aren thought, But someone has to do it.815Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡL9uL0W20D2
It took him twenty minutes to drag the remaining ten mangled bodies from the blood stained asphalt and into a scattered row in the snow. There had been two other children among them; Aren took extra care to ensure they rested neatly where he lay them. He hated burying children the most. The wounds didn't bother him so much anymore — it was the faces, so innocent and peaceful looking, yet... dead. Haunting. Aren saw his own son in every one, and it made the sour taste of bile creep slowly into the back of his throat.815Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡzdxFJbVBTB
With a heavy sigh, Aren stopped to catch his breath. He looked up and surveyed the sky; deepening purple hues were beginning to pool on the eastern horizon. Like purple blood stains, he thought suddenly. The snow continued to fall in lazy spurts as he hastily picked up his spade. He needed to finish up here, and quickly. The streets were the very last place he wanted to be caught when darkness fell, especially with the scent of death so fresh about the place.815Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡhziZX4jE8a
He tested his shovel's wooden handle in his hands before jamming it into the ground as deep as it would go. The spade was nice and sharp; use had honed the edges nicely and the work was considerably easier than when he had first started, two years ago. The first such inches came up as hard-packed snow. Below that, rock-solid dirt that had completely frozen in the past few weeks of cold weather and snowfall. The grass in these lawns had died long ago with the lack of water, and then residents, to keep it alive. Scorching summers and frigid winters had turned the once well-manicured greenery into all but lifeless squares of inhospitable dirt, broken only by crumbling concrete walkways and broken wooden fences. Neighborhoods that had been teeming with twenty-second century life just three years previously now resembled tired, burned out shells of what the once were.815Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡgNQZMgPS0I
That's what we get for trying to play God — again, Aren thought bitterly as he dumped the contents of his spade onto the sidewalk and angrily shoved it into the ground again. He had once lived in a cozy two story house much like the one that stood before him. In fact, much of what he had seen and owned resembled much of what was in front of him; same-looking suburban neighborhood, same-looking tree out back (though this one was long dead), and same white, plain-looking electric automobile like the one laying overturned a hundred years up the street. He had held the same redundant job putting numbers and letters into the National Database — a job he had discovered served no other purpose than to provide the illusion that men worked for their completely adequate Government currency handout every month.815Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡMCcBeOX0IY
It didn't bother Aren much at the time; he, like most everyone else, had just accepted the things the Suitmen (as they were commonly called now) were doing in the Government. They had, after all, gotten rid of things like hunger, thirst, disease, and war. Food came in a shiny silver pill, hydration in a translucent blue one. Sickness was kept ay bay by a tiny red pill, and all instruments of war had been melted down and buried. Aren's own parents had seen the First and Second Revolutions, when famine and overpopulation and genocide had be so rampant that the people had begged the Government (then something called the U.N., Aren forgot what it stood for) to put an end to their suffering. It had taken decades of painful reconstruction and development, but in the end it succeeded. His parents had faithfully praised the black-coated men and their smooth hair and tongues for their skillful eradication of such horrors. It was an admiration they had all but forced Aren and his brother to share as well.815Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡhQEmuZPDIH
Like most children of his generation, Aren had been enthusiastic of the Government at first; for seventeen years he had retained an innocent appreciation for their "scientific advancements;" that is, until he found out about the Arties.815Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡcS2r3FJ8d7
Aren looked around, then down at his hole, mildly surprised to find it a foot and a half deep and several long. He was prone to losing himself in thought, only to discover his body continued performing whatever task he had engaged himself in before he did so. He shivered and pulled his coat closer before once again pushing his shovel into the dirt. Darkness continued to creep up on him; he needed to hurry.815Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡEQiKaFs8x5
The Arties— artificially born children —were what kept the streets deserted after dark. They were prowling in packs now, that was arelatively recent development. It was hard to keep close observation on a species that hunted humans by night and disappeared before sunrise, that was true enough, but Aren had been keeping a detailed journal with his findings. He didn't know much about the creatures themselves (he didn't think anyone did) but he knew where they came from. He had watched the changes in his own seven year-old son the day of the solar flare. The Suitmen had decided some years back that naturally born children were imperfect and too unpredictable, bothmedically and mentally. Each couple from then on were required to apply for children through the BBB (Bureau of Better Beings) for a suitable,genetically enhanced fetus to surrogate and call their own. The new children were healthy, intelligent, well-behaved, and very mentally sound. That was before the EDEN solar flare two years ago.815Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡDQMUFiLfKB
Scientists had named it EDEN–"Environmentally Devastating, Environmentally Negative"– and it had caused massive problems to the delicate biological balance inside the Arties' systems. It had started with a round of fever and flu-like symptoms in his son Matthew;
"Nothing to worry about" the home-medic had said after leaving Aren and his wife Kristine with a vial of biomeds to administer to their child. Aren had gone to work as usual, tapped mindlessly away at his keyboard as usual, and come home to find something horrifying and very, very unusual- his wife was lying in the foyer, throat torn out and blood smeared across every imaginable surface.
Aren shuddered and felt his stomach convulse. He hadn't loved Kristine; "love" was just a myth for story books in this modern society. Even then, there was something all the more gruesome about finding the woman you had lived with for almost ten years in a mangled heap in your front hall. Aren looked around and felt a shiver run through his spine. His hole was finished; he only needed to pile the bodies in it and get off the street. As he dumped the first man inside his grave, a shrill, animalistic howl tore through the air a few blocks away. Aren jumped and his mind immediately flashed back to the first time he had heard that sound.
It had been that first night, after he had rushed to the Peace Officers' headquarters in the city to tell the about his wife. Of course, they had kept him there for questioning and advised he spent the night to reclaim his nerves while they cleaned up the mess. The howls has started at about two in the morning; Aren could hear them from his little cell in the building. They had grown more numerous and voluminous until, perhaps an hour later, and orderly covered in blood and carrying a handgun had rushed in shouting about children slaughtering people in the streets before collapsing dead upon the floor. The orderly had been all too correct: whatever mutations had been caused by the solar flare had now turned the Artificially Born children into a raving species of bloodthirsty animals. All over the world, society had collapsed under the weight of thousands of murderous children and the people who just couldn't bring themselves to kill them.
Aren was not one of those people.
He patted his pocket unconsciously and felt the lump that was the handgun through the denim. He had never handled a weapon before that night; nerveless, he had grown very familiar with it in the last two years. Only those who could handle such things were alive now. The Arties had purged the world of those unwilling to survive at all costs.
It took Aren another fifteen minutes to pile the rest of the bodies in the grave and cover it over with a thin layer of dirt. He couldn't do much more, the howls were growing closer and the snow was starting to pick up into an all-out blizzard. He gathered his shovel, mouthed a short prayer (something he had read in an old book) and started off down the street.
It was two blocks down that he found the Artie. Stumbled upon it, really. The crunching of bones and frozen flesh snapped him out of his thoughts and he froze. In the twilight, a hunched creature kneeled down over the oozing body of what once was a very large woman. The creature turned and snarled, dropping the hunk of flesh it had been feasting on and starting toward him on all fours. Aren didn't have time to think, to draw his weapon, he barely had time to move. He swung his spade as hard as he could and gasped in pain as the head of it connected and his wrists reverberated with the shock. He let go of the handle, which was yanked away as the Artie fell sideways to the ground; the metal blade had embedded itself six inches into the monster's skull.
Aren cursed as he tripped over the curb and landed flat on his rear, gasping for breath. He didn't mind killing them; it's what he did now. Still, he couldn't stop his heart from pounding deep in his chest. mound on the sidewalk. Aren stood shakily to his feet. He needed to get his spade and get off the streets.
Against his better judgement, Aren rolled the dead Artie onto its back with the handle of his shovel as he attempted to dislodge the tool from its nest of bone and gristle.
He immediately wished he hadn't.
Matthew's battered face looked up at him- there was no mistaking the birthmark on his forehead. He was covered in blood, mostly around the mouth, flesh ragged and torn in several places on his face. Aren wanted to be sick. Somewhere, deep inside him, he wished that he had known, that his son could have taken him with him to whatever hell awaited on the other side of death. He had been waiting for this day, he supposed, ever since Matthew had escaped and joined the pack.
At least it was me, he mused darkly. At least it wasn't a complete stranger that ended him.
He looked around. The howls had moved past him and were headed north. He hefted his shovel and gently scooped the frail body over his shoulder.
It was gruesome and thankless work, but somebody had to do it.
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