Homunculize: Sookram

• Posted by ProbsCoolerThanYou April 10, 2016 - 1,111 views

  

  The McClellan boy was the oldest of his family, despite his youth--he was thirteen. This gave him certain responsibilities. He tended the crops the most, fetched water the most, scrounged the most. The most menial of his tasks, though, was his post as a watchman--a useless position...the farm was too poor to be raided, despite its proximity to the highway.

  So when the boy sat on the hill, and saw the men, green jackets covered by dirt and a variety of weaponry, charging him, he almost forgot to sound the alarm. They began to scream though, and so did he, running back down the hill away from the highway, the whole time ringing the bell with vigor.

  Despite the fact that this had never happened before, the family knew exactly what to do. The two younger children, sisters, retreated to the farmhouse, and the boy’s parents took their positions around the fence. The fence, metal and quite short, served more as concealment than cover for the two. The boy reached the same spot as his parents, and took up the pistol he had been assigned.

  All this planning was for naught, though. The raiders came in an organized fashion, not like the reckless charges the McClellans had heard of before. There were six of them, each armed with a rifle or a shotgun. However, their bullets didn’t hit a single member of the family, and instead impacted the sod of the farmland, kicking up dirt into the eyes of the crouched farmers.

  Terrified by the spectacle placed before them, the family capitulated, and dropped their weapons all at once. The oddly-organized raiders circled them up at the center of their encampment, the little household, squat and bleakly-colored, sat to their left.

  There was a quiet exchange of views for a short time, the “raiders” circling the imprisoned farmers, and the family looking back defiantly. This ended at the cocking of a hammer, and the man that appeared to be the lead of the group rose a heavy pistol to head of the McClellan family. Shivering despite the muggy morning weather, he looked up at the man who held a gun to his head.

  Looking his wife in the eyes, they both seemed to silently agree upon something, and Jebediah McClellan began with a stammer, “We don’ wan’ to die, sir.”

  The leader replied with a laugh, high and piercing like a hyena’s. “Of course you don’t,” the man replied to Mr. McClellan.

  “We can give you our thin’s, sir, if you’d not mind,” the father replied unsteadily, “We’ve corn and ‘tatos.”

  “I don’t need your food, man. Do we look hungry to you?” The assailant retorted, pressing his barrel harder against the man’s pockmarked forehead.

  “Perhap’ there is somethin’ else we could give you, sir,” McClellan said, “If you’d only come close I could tell you.”

  The raider leaned in towards the man, listening intently to the terrified farmer’s whispers. After a minute or so, he stood back up, nodded, and turned to his compatriots, still circling the family.

  “Round ‘em up,” he said, circling the air with his fingers. The men complied, and picked up the three children in their arms.

  ***

  “I’ve something to admit,” the leader said to the McClellan boy as they walked down the cracked highway, “I’m not really a raider, you know. I don’t even think I’ve killed more than six actual raiders, so I wasn’t even sure what to do, really. Did I do it well? I thought I did it well. I tried to whoop and holler enough, but I wasn’t quite sure.

  Look kid, the point is, I’m not a raider. I’m a mercenary. I was hired by some people to do this job. And if your dumbass parents hadn’t given you up willingly, we were gonna just kill ‘em and take you.”

  The McClellan boy had no answer, and so he continued walking, sullen.

  The day was quiet, and birds could be heard solemnly singing amongst the dead trees of the surrounding wood. A state of quiescence seemed to take over the whole place, and the place had reached the kind of quiet where things seem almost in slow motion. Then started the crashing.

  It began far away in the wood, but became evident clearly through the mostly-dead treeline, which gave almost unhindered views through the forest. Two beasts smashed their way through the low-lying brush, stomping over ferns and snapping saplings under heavy paw. Their roar, ferocious and piercing, startled the unaware children. The mercenaries, however, had paid attention to the crashing. So when the two Yao Guai emerged from the treeline, they were prepared, and had their weapons trained on the hideously deformed creatures.

  Another roar, and the first of the bears reared up. This, however, exposed its thick underbelly, and the mercs took their chance. The reports leapt across the impromptu battlefield, reverberating against the rocks that surrounded the road. Each shot was met with a jolt by the wounded bear, now angered. It began its charge across the short treeless expanse that separated the highway and the woodlands, howling like a hurt dog the whole way. The Yao Guai’s regular lumber was replaced by a relative crawl. The other bear had avoided attention, and continued on its charge, closing to the short distance of forty yards.

  The first bear was on its final breaths, however, and in a final fit of rage, reared up again. The leader, whose rifle was empty, pulled his .44 and sent one final shot forwards, dropping the bear.

  The second continued on, however, unfazed by the death of its brother. The six men on the highway, magazines empty, reloaded as the beast descended upon them. Their weapons all clicked together in unison, and they each raised again their rifles to their shoulders. The bear continued closing, then a mere twenty yards from the group. The fire continued, and the ears of the children rang from the blast of several dozen shots. The bear roared a weakened roar, but the men continued firing, directing their aim at the fat head of the Yao Guai. Each shot chipped away at the matted skin and thick flesh of the beast, and dents marked its belly and head--the beast was close to death.
  A small hill was all that was between the raised plain and the highway, sunken into the ground. But the bear, having lost control of its body, tumbled down the hill, and cracked its head on a broken jersey barrier.

  The mercenaries holstered or dropped their weapons, and took to skinning the thing.

  ***

  The cave appeared normal, or as normal as a cave as alien as that one could have been. Thick stalactites grew from the uneven ceiling, and droplets from the formations had created eroding puddles upon the fair tan floor. The leader looked intently, however, for something. What it was, the McClellan boy didn’t quite know.

  They roamed the cave, which was shaped like a rectangle--long and thin--for a minute or two, the leader of the group separating from the rest. Finally, he yelled to the rest of the group that he had found it. They all lined up behind him, and he knocked on the product of his hunt, a thin black door well concealed behind a stalagmite formation. Knocking, a shift could be heard behind the door. The mercenary almost expected a thin hatch to open, and a pair of shifty eyes to ask him what the secret word was. However, no such face appeared, nor did such a hatch. So the leader moved his face close to the door, planting his dirty cheek against it.

  Quietly, he emitted some sort of password, the whole time never moving his face from its spot:

  “Three-seven-twelve-thirteen,” the man said, and the door was opened promptly.

   

  The room inside was clean, in contrast to the dank cave behind them. A welcome desk, quaint, was before the group, and the mercenary approached it awkwardly (“Am I checking into a goddamn hotel?” he asked himself).

  “Here with some, uh, kids, I guess,” the leader said with a wince to the lady at the desk. She barely looked up, and instead continued to type into her terminal.

  The room was quite beautiful, the kid noticed, despite the fact that most of the upholstery was black. It was true...black was pervasive in the place. Even the framed picture of the little lighthouse with the elegant waves crashing on its rocks was framed in black. What a strange color, the boy thought.

  All the arrangements seemed in place, and so the lady looked up, finally, from her terminal, and managed a hideous wink at the McClellan boy. It looked more like a shudder, if the boy was to tell the truth, but he ignored it.

  She pressed a button on her desk, and two men came from an unseen door. They shooed away the mercenaries, who left promptly through the same door they came from. The McClellan kid would almost miss the safety of their travel together.

  The two men ushered them into a door behind the desk, and the five of them together descended the stairs. The theme of blackness continued, and the barely lit walkway was further darkened by the black wallpaper. They reached the bottom of the stairs and were led into another room, with another, oddly similar woman at a quaint little desk again. The men motioned to the three children behind them, and the woman nodded.

  She motioned for the two little girls to come up first, and they approached apprehensively. She gave them a sickly sweet smile, and started to nod her head repeatedly, like one of those pre-war bird trinkets that drank from the cup of water, and bobbed back and forth.

  “Looks like you two sweeties will be heading down to Aptitude in Combat Training. It’ll be bundles of fun to learn from the best!” in reality, they would merely be punching bags, but the secretary found that most subjects preferred the former title.

  She then motioned to the boy, and he approached also, watching silently his sisters’ descent in a rickety elevator. “We’ve got a really very quite special assignment for you, toughie!” she said to the kid, “Replacement Therapy Training! You’ll learn so much!” And a guard emerged from another elevator. He took the McClellan kid by the arm, and looked down at him, saying, “You’re gonna be a goddamn doctor kid. Lighten up.” The two went down the elevator in silence, the boy unsure of exactly what he would be doing.

  ***

  First lessons, and the boys were split between excitement and fright. They all bunked together, all fourteen of them, and as such they had created a bond between themselves, regardless of how many fights they all got into. They sat in a semi-circle around the podium, raised above their stadium-style grey seating. The rest of the room, the walls, the ceiling, were pitch black.

  A door slid open at the front of the room, and a man came out of the darkness, and into the thin light of the room. He sidled up to the podium, and, resting upon it, spoke to the group of young boys:

  “Here, you will be giving those poor men and women in the wastes what they really want--to be broken down to their purest form. Those silly fools just don’t know they want it yet.”