Evil Ernie: Aftermath
Fragment 1
“So this is where you’ve gotten to.”
He almost jumped at the sound of that voice, and the flash of anger that caused dragged a low growl from the back of his throat. Gil didn’t seem phased, and Evil watched him carefully as the reporter picked his way through the undergrowth, eventually coming to sit down next to him on the edge of the ravine.
“Woah, bit of a scary place to enjoy the view.”
It was easily a two hundred foot fall straight down. Considering some of the other things that had happened to him, free-fall barely made it on Evil’s register. He supposed it was different for the living; it was hard to remember. It had been so long, and even then he’d only been a child. Children were supposedly oblivious to the dangers of mortality. At least, he was sure he’d heard that somewhere. Probably in therapy; it sounded like the kind of thing one of the Docs would’ve said.
With a loud yawn and exaggerated stretch, Gil threw himself backwards down onto the grass, his long legs dangling over the edge of the ravine. Tipping his hat so that only a disarming grin and the briefest flick of goatee were visible, he asked, “So what’s on your mind?”
“… huh?” Evil just blinked, confused.
“Well, you’re sitting up here all by yourself and you’ve got that expression you only use when you’re brooding or scouring the Deadmind, and your head’s not on fire so I’m guessing it’s the former.”
Evil frowned at the assessment; either he was too transparent or Gil was too perceptive. Ruefully, he suspected it may have been a combination of both; Gil was a reporter, after all, and insomuch as he knew anything about what that meant, really, Evil suspected not just a small bit of it had to do with reading other people. The hard way; the way he himself had never really needed to develop, what with things being as they were. Of course, the other fact was that Evil was fairly certain he wasn’t well-socialised enough to be anything other than morbidly transparent. It was just a skill he’d never had to cultivate; the kid was a bit better at it, in a deviously sociopathic kind of way, but being a six foot tall glowing green ghoul didn’t exactly lend itself to any kind of social subtlety. People generally tended to react to him in one of two ways – either with fear or hatred – and neither of them really left any room for manoeuvring. Especially when all was said and done and necks were snapped and the floor slicked with blood.
In so far as he could tell, Gil didn’t regard him with any special hatred, and lately even the fear was gone. Evil supposed it was his own fault, but then again there didn’t really seem to be any logical reason why Gil should fear him. Not any more. Evil supposed it was a sign he was getting old; once upon a time he would have just persecuted the man out of fun. Then he would have snapped the reporter’s neck and gouged his eyes out with his pencil. The thought wasn’t nearly as satisfying as it should have been. In fact, it wasn’t satisfying at all; it was downright disturbing. And that bothered him.
“The past is another country, boss.”
“… hn.”
One bright hazel eye appeared under the brim of Gil’s hat at the sound of Smiley’s drawl. “So did you want to talk about it?”
It took a moment to register that Gil was talking to him again. Did he want to talk about… what, exactly? Evil didn’t think so; what he really felt like doing, he thought, was ripping someone’s spleen out through their oesophagus. Someone who wasn’t Gil. In the end he just shook his head. “No.”
“Okay, anything I can do?”
“… no.” After a pause he added, “Thank you.” That was the sort of thing you were supposed to say, wasn’t it? When someone made an offer like that. The kid would know; he’d always been better at this kind of thing. Not that either of them were going to be winning any awards or anything.
Gil just grinned under his hat. “I’ve been studying the satmaps,” he drawled eventually, and Evil was glad for the subject change. Maps were good; he understood maps. “New Salem is still at least two days’ ride away, but there’s a town called Rotcreek that we can probably get to tomorrow afternoon.”
A town. Evil’s eyes narrowed slightly; he didn’t like towns, they were full of the living, especially this far west. Noisy, stinking living. Gil knew that too, he supposed, which is why the reporter had asked; he wouldn’t insist if Evil said no. On the other hand, the unfortunate fact remained that Gil himself was a noisy stinking living. He’d probably want to stop for the chance to not have to sleep on the floor, or to eat a proper meal; the living liked that sort of thing. Evil wondered why he cared.
“How big?” he asked eventually.
Gil gave a shrug. “Not many, from the look of the satmaps; maybe twenty, forty something like that. There’s a bit of farming, maybe a store or an inn.
“Hicksville,” he growled, and the reporter chuckled.
“E, my friend, I’ve walked back and forth across this shattered land and I have to say I’ve only come across two types of farming settlements. The simple type with freckles and applepie, and the scary type with six fingers and shotguns. Most people ’round here are the former. So long as you don’t challenge their ideas and don’t try and stick around they’re happy to see you fed and watered. Good ol’ fashioned hospitality.”
“Not to Dead Onez…“ It was almost a threat, and Gil just sighed.
“People out here don’t know any better; they’re just living how they think is right.”
“They burn their corpses; we hear them scream.” It was probably the longest sentence he’d said all day. The Deadmind was quiet up here – that was the whole point – but it also meant that when something happened, it echoed.
Gil honestly looked upset at that. “I know,” he said eventually. “I don’t think it’s right either. I’ve lived out east, in the PsyStat; I know what it’s like, but these people… these people don’t. They never got over the Mississippi Wall; some people I’ve spoken to still think it’s standing, still live bunkered down under mountains defending against a Destroyer who died a hundred and fifty years ago. The Faithful are strong up here, and from what I’ve seen they do good work; it’s not the people’s fault they buy into the Faith’s lies as well as its charity.”
He just snorted ruefully at that and Smiliey spat out a gob of lime green spit. “Pah, people’re suck fucking sheep. Always gettin’ sucked in by God’s latest scam, never botherin’ t’ think fer themselves…“
“When y’ve got nothin’, an’ someone promises y’ everythin’…“
He could feel Smiliey’s discomfort. “… hmph. Not th’ same,” he muttered, but neither of them really believed it.
Gil tactfully ignored them both. “I know you’re not keen on towns,” he offered. “And you’re probably right about the danger…“
“No,” Evil growled eventually. “We go.”
Gil almost looked relieved.
He found out why the following afternoon. Gil had been exactly right in his estimate, and they’d picked up the trail a little after two o’clock. By three they’d reached a signpost; a small, scribbled affair reading Welcome to ROTCREEK! in big, old-fashioned burnt-in letters. Underneath, someone had scratched, No corpses allowed. Ernie had sighed at that, and Gil had shaken his head. “See what I mean? They’ve got no idea.”
Ernie supposed he had to give them that at least; people this far away from Necropolis didn’t really understand about the Deadmind, didn’t understand that it was hard for all but the most powerful ghouls to stay conscious for any length of time being so alone. The dead didn’t do ‘alone’ very well. Most dead, anyway. Ernie still wasn’t exactly sure if he counted.
Gradually, the landscape changed into clear felled farms, and a long, battered barbed wire fence rolled lazily out along the left side of the road. Beyond it, Ernie could make out a herd of what looked from this distance like sheep or goats, and beyond that something that might have been a small cornfield. It occurred to him that he’d never really been out in this new world; had no knowledge whatsoever about how it worked. He had vague memories of watching aerial shots of farms on the TV as a kid; of huge harvesters slowly massacring wheat fields that stretched as far as the eye could see, of thousands of battery hens stacked up to the roof in tiny, shit-smelling cages. Somewhat perversely, the journey to Rotcreek was starting to feel like a trip back in time; the feeling was reinforced when, half an hour later, they passed a man pushing an old-fashioned plough behind a donkey.
Gil waved when he saw the man, and swung his strick over towards the fence. Grudgingly, Ernie followed; acutely aware that this was the first person they’d met since leaving Eden almost a week prior. It made everything feel somehow excruciatingly real; he was going home. Following a hunch across three thousand miles, back to somewhere he suspected he really shouldn’t be going to, accompanied by a guy he barely knew… and one of the living at that. Eden had been okay; they’d known, in Eden, and he’d been there long enough that no-one had bothered with it anymore. He’d kept them all safe and they’d left him alone, and everything had been nice; nice enough that, now that he thought about it, he was forced to realise that he’d been perfectly prepared to spend the rest of eternity hiding up in the mountains. The notion was actually kind of depressing.
And now they were in the middle of godknowshwere, about to wave down some strange yokel with a donkey and, Ernie suspected, a shotgun hidden somewhere inappropriate. He was hit by a sudden wave of paranoia, and damn Gil’s assertations that no-one remembered what he looked like any more, not really, and eye aside there was nothing particularly unusual about him. Even the eye was okay, Gil had said, since chaos-marks like that were fairly common amongst people born close to Pandora or Armageddon. Some people thought they were lucky; even this far out west someone with a Mark on them would probably be looked after by any town they were passing through, the inhabitants ever-hopeful of a few words with a dead aunt or something similar. And these were the same people who were so terrified of ghouls they burnt all their corpses within hours of death; Ernie didn’t understand the living sometimes. Most of the time, really.
“Excuse me, is this the way to Rotcreek?” Of course it was – they all knew it – but Gil grinned disarmingly anyway. He was good with people, Gil.
The man stopped his ploughing and regarded them both slowly from underneath the brim of a wide straw hat. He should have been chewing on the end of a piece of wheat. He wasn’t. “Yessir, that it is,” he said eventually. Ernie was coiled tight as a spring – he kept getting flashes in his head of the farmer suddenly pulling out a shotgun and that was making Evil twitchy – but there was nothing more than cautious curiosity coming off the man. “Y’all headed down our way?”
Gil nodded. “We’re on our way to New Salem and the ride’s been tough; we were hoping we’d be able to buy some dinner and a bed in town. Name’s Malacai, but people call me Gil; this here’s E.” Ernie waved, extremely self-conscious, when the farmer’s gaze turned to him.
“Jake,” the farmer replied, sticking one weather beaten hand out across the fence. Gil shook it enthusiastically. “You’ll find Sam’s tavern in town. I hope you boys are prepared to work for your dinner; we don’t have much use for townmoney up here.”
“I’m sure that won’t be a problem, will it E?”
Ernie blinked, suddenly finding himself in the middle of a conversation. “I’m good at lifting things,” he offered eventually.
Much to his surprise, Jake the farmer laughed good-naturedly. “That’s the spirit, boy.” After a moment he added, “I’ll probably be down at Sam’s later tonight, might see you boys there.”
“Might at that, thanks for the advice Jake.” Gil tipped his hat roguishly and started pulling his strick away from the fence; it protested a bit, Ernie got the impression it’d been enjoying eating the sweet grass by the side of the road.
“Faith guide you boys.” Jake offered, making an odd sort of gesture across his chest. Ernie had been to Sunday school as a kid and the motion looked something like the sign of the cross, except not. It was almost a child-like imitation; he assumed it was a sign of the Faithful, though he’d never had much exposure. Missionaries had come to Eden every now and again – usually as an attempt to destroy the Museum – but the townsfolk had always politely chased them out. Occasionally that didn’t work and on those nights everyone would go to bed very early, lock all the ghouls indoors, and ignored the terrified screams. Sometimes, the next day, a new ghoul would be waiting patiently for work in the town square. Usually, however, the missionaries would simply never be seen again.
Eden had never been bothered much.
They hit the town an hour before sundown. Sam turned out to be a round, no-nonsense middle-aged black woman who – as promised – promptly set them to work.
“Don’t get many visitors in these parts,” Ernie heard her telling Gil as they stood out back of the tavern scrubbing sheets against an old-fashioned washboard. For his part, Ernie had been put to work chopping wood; a task involving swinging axes and carrying heavy objects, two things he was good at. “Not many towns further west for people to come down from.”
“No, ma’am,” Gil replied easily. “We came down from Eden ourselves.” Ernie’s axe almost missed the log he was splitting.
“Chill, dude,” Gil’s thoughts echoed in his head. “It’s not a problem, watch.”
Sam frowned, and Ernie felt the mistrust brewing. “Eden? Isn’t that the place with the, the whattsit…?”
“The Museum of the Destroyer, yes ma’am it is.”
She spat, making the sign of the Faith as she did so. “Terrible place I’ve heard. Imagine worshipping the Destroyer.”
Gil was smooth. “They don’t worship him, ma’am; it’s a memorial, not a church. It’s rumoured that after Armageddon Eden was the place Doctor Mary Young took the Chaos-Key; the memorial was built on top of the site of the Key, originally to house Doctor Young’s journals and memoirs. She was absolutely determined that if the Destroyer ever came back, people would need to know what she knew in order to defeat him.”
“You seem to know a lot about it, boy.”
Gil just shrugged. “I’m a journalist; I’ve been commissioned to write a book on the Destroyer and the War of the Dead.”
Sam shook her head. “Now that’s just crazy. Why would people want such a thing? Bad business, diggin’ up the past like that.”
The axe hit the base of the old tree stump chopping-block with a familiar thud. “But people need to know,” Ernie said, eyes flicking briefly to Gil for reassurance. “Otherwise it all gets blow up out of proportion. This was stuff that really happened, the— Destroyer really existed, really killed millions of people and really created the Deadmind. But he wasn’t really a hundred feet tall, or able to shoot lazers from his eyes, or call down rains of blood from the sky like you hear in all those stories.” Ernie didn’t add that lately he’d had the sneaking suspicion that the only reason he’d never done these things was simply because it hadn’t occurred to him to try.
Gil picked up for him, nodding empathically. “That’s right; the more overblown the stories get the easier it is to dismiss the Destroyer as a kind of charicture. A phantom bogeyman to scare children with.”
When Sam next spoke, the woman’s words were careful. “Not that you never heard me say this, mind – the Preacher doesn’t stand for this kinda talk – but I heard some folks say one that the Destroyer, that he was born a human kid, just like you and me. That it was something else that changed him, made him bad…“ She studied Gil carefully for a reaction. So did Ernie.
For his part, the reporter just nodded. “It’s not unlikely.” His voice was slow, deliberate; the voice of someone sharing a momentous secret. “I’ve read some of Doctor Young’s journals and that’s certainly what she seems to have believed.”
“I think that’s worse, then,” Sam said, shaking her head sadly. “The vengance of Hell set lose upon the world is one thing; thinking that it was all the work of some kid is terrifying. What could possibly do that to a boy?”
Gil was about to reply but Ernie beat him to it. “Believe me,” he said, “if I could give you a simple answer, I would.”
“Tell me about the Faith.”
It was about an hour later; they’d been released from Sam’s careful eye and sent upstairs to wash before dinner. Running water, it seemed, was not something that Rotcreek had the pleasure of enjoying. Ernie was mostly okay – the dead didn’t exactly sweat – but Gil was currently shirtless and bent over the low washbasin. For all his supposed worldliness, Ernie got the feeling Gil much preferred the finer things in life.
The reporter looked up, face dripping with water. “Huh?”
“The Faith,” Ernie prompted again. “Tell me about it.”
“Oh, well…“ Gil dried his face off on a pristine if slightly worn white towel. “Not much to tell, really. They’re a branch of the Christian Church, I suppose; but they’re considered heretical pretty much everywhere other than the Broken States. Near as anyone can tell, they came out of the old Bible Belt about the same time the Mississippi Wall went up. Some preachers down there got it into their heads that, well, you were the Anti-Christ and the War of the Dead was the Apocalypse.”
“Seems reasonable I guess.” His parents had been Baptists, and the worse things had gotten the more fervent they’d become. The connection with the Book of Revelation had occurred to him even back then, though he hadn’t really cared much about it at the time.
Gil nodded. “Right, well, that’s not the heretical part. The heretical part comes when some of those preachers start thinking, ‘Hang on, it’s supposed to be the faithful who get resurrected bodily in order to meet Christ’. So this belief starts developing that the Destroyer isn’t the Anti-Christ but rather he’s the Second Coming of Christ, except something’s gone wrong. God’s gone mad or has been lying to humanity all this time. They look at ghouls and they see this unified, raptured force; impervious the pain and suffering, immortal, eternally in the presence of their Lord. Except the prospect is terrifying, not what they’d been promised at all. So they reject it, they reject God and Christ and the Bible.”
“Like Satanists or whatever?”
“Kinda I guess. There are a few splits in the ranks; Luciferian Faithful believe that Lucifer’s rejection of God was the right course of action. Some Luciferians believe God can be redeemed, others don’t. Humanist Faithful reject the worship of non-human divinities completely; they believe in them, they just don’t worship them. And Psychologians believe in the New Messiahs; who you’d know as one or both of either Doctors Young and Price.”
Ernie just blinked once. “… you’re shitting me.”
Gil grinned his mad coyote grin. “I wish. That’s really all there is to it, anyway. The Faith is pretty prevalent amongst the Broken States; when the United States collapsed most Christians converted to the Faith. Those that didn’t were often persecuted, since Christians were believed to be the ones most likely to become ghouls. Jews and Muslims got it pretty bad, too; they were thought to worship the same God, but of course they didn’t have the Christian roots so thought the whole theory behind the Faith was ludicrous.”