Lyndon Perry: The Last Prayer

Q. What prompted you to self-publish this story?

A. When I saw another silo story pop up on Amazon, I thought, wow, here’s an amazing development. The author of a great series is allowing/encouraging fans to jump into his swimming pool. Fan fic was receiving legitimacy! So I contacted W. J. Davies, the author of The Runner , asked him a few questions, sent him this manuscript, and received such great encouragement that I decided to go for it. Plus, the fact that his story has already had over 6,000 downloads did cross my mind. [grin]

Q. Isn’t “fan fic” plagiarizing?

A. Not if the author, who owns the rights to the world he or she created, gives you the green light. I sent Howey the opening scene of this story and asked him if it “fit” his vision of silo life. His reply: “I love it. Feel free to write and publish whatever you want.”

Q. Anything to add?

A. Just that I made these questions up and asked them to myself. Thanks for reading! Feel free to email me at lyngperry@yahoo.comand say hello. Oh, and if you enjoyed this story please consider leaving a review. Very much appreciated!

Coming Soon: The Last Uprising — A Silo Story by Lyndon Perry

The crowd of sweepers watched in confusion as one of their own stepped into the grim panoramic view that was projected onto the width of the cafeteria wall. The figure, in a form-fitted suit to protect her from the toxic world outside their underground silo, was spinning, running, pointing. Those who knew her could easily imagine her laughing. She was a child, after all. Her enthusiasm had been contagious.

So had her dreams. Dreams of paradise, of a heaven that awaited them on the other side of a yellow hatch door and protective airlock. She’d spoken of it with such certainty. The hatch wasn’t protecting them from the tainted atmosphere, she’d implied with her words. It was imprisoning them in their strict and stifling bunker.

“Heaven’s real. It’s just outside.” Those were her actual words. And her fellow sweepers believed them.

For that crime she’d been sent to clean.

( The Last Uprising will be available soon. Check here for updates.)

Available Now: Ulemet and the Jaguar God (A Mesoamerican Fantasy Novella)

The moon was dark rust at her untimely birth.

Ulemet’s mother had labored three days and nights, fainting in pain every few hours, and only responded to the shaman’s mixture of kakawa and sorosi when she was forced to drink. Once the elixir wore off, she would succumb to agony once again and cry out in shrieks that competed with the jungle’s nightly squawks and screeches.

When the moon rose a fourth time, dark and blood-red, she gushed forth a baby along with fetid fluids and putrefied organs. With desperate murmurs, she reached out weakly for her child. The medicine man, sneering at what the woman’s womb had cast out, thrust the limp and dying infant onto her belly. He left the dingy hut with a curt command for the wide-eyed midwife to dispose of the abomination before the sun’s rising.

Upon seeing the malformed otentzata that claimed by crying to be a baby, Ulemet’s mother keened in despair and let herself hemorrhage, praying that her spirit would quickly fly to whatever god would take her. Her father, with curses on his tongue, not prayers, abandoned his small family to the care of the attending woman and fled into the jungle. The midwife, grieving the recent loss of an only child and with breasts aching for relief, wrapped the baby, a girl she noted with indifference, in a bit of worked leather and shambled back to her own shelter.

And despite the village priest’s imprecations following the discovery of the defiant deed, the child lived.

To appease the shaman’s wrath, the Olmec village elders declared the infant zacila , one cursed-to-wander. Deformed and outcast, the child was destined to be rejected; forsaken even by the woman who raised her through her toddling years. When her breasts ran dry, the former midwife disappeared into a moonless night.

Ulemet remained and scavenged for survival by wandering the forest and from hut to hut. The village had no obligation to raise her, but some were sympathetic. Still, they mostly left the misshapen child to fend for herself until the fortunate day she would wander away into the rainforest for good. Until that day arrived, however, she stubbornly participated in village life to the extent she was allowed.

Her face marred with a twisted upper lip and a cleft head, Ulemet was ugly in a way that attracted second looks, but seldom pity. With barely a feminine feature, she was often mocked by the other children as a should-be boy. This did not stop her from attempting to join them in their childhood games, especially the ulama . But when she tried, she was frequently shoved to the side, relegated to watch as her teammates kicked the little rubber ball across temporary boundaries and through makeshift hoops.

The ulama , however, was what kept her alive.

She spent her days and many nights kicking and punting and dribbling a crudely fashioned rubber ball under the watchful eye of Uaxaca, the jaguar god of her people. When she looked into the almond-shape eyes of the stone carving near the clearing where they played, she knew the animal spirit gave her strength.

Daily, she came to the crude ballcourt in anticipation of those rare occasions when she was allowed to join in. Even then, the others would soon banish her as her shooting acrobatics often put them to shame. This prompted the older boys to slap her and kick her until she escaped to the relative safety of her jungle hideaway where she kept a small image of her god and a few other belongings. Yet Ulemet clung to the hope that one day she would be accepted, welcomed among her people. She would continue to cling to that hope until it proved to be misplaced.

The sad occasion arrived with her first bleed.

In the midst of a game in which she was told she could defend but not kick, Ulemet blocked a routine shot with her stomach. Normally, her strong muscles bounced the ball back into play, but this time she doubled over in pain. Her groin cramped and released and when she stood back up a dirty red rivulet streamed down from behind her loincloth. Her playmates laughed and pointed as she, in surprised confusion, smeared the blood along her inner thigh. Embarrassed and enraged by her embarrassment, she screamed hollow threats at the other children who only laughed the louder.

Without looking back, Ulemet dashed to her tiny hovel to gather her things. With tears streaming her face, she fled the village with only her throwing stick and an animal skin pouch hosting a few items slung over her shoulder. She ran into the jungle as fast as she could, the leather strap cutting an angle across her flat chest with each bouncing movement. Yet she needn’t have hurried for no one was chasing her. No one would even look for her. No one would miss her.

Still, she ran, forging a path where there was none, avoiding a path when she came to one. When she should have collapsed, she continued on for the pain in her lungs and legs and side dulled the pain that welled from within. Even when darkness came she kept moving blindly forward, a stumbling of legs and a flopping of arms, heedless of the danger of the jungle night.

At the point of exhaustion her instincts prevailed and she climbed into an olma tree, barely wedging herself in before immediately falling into a fitful and nightmarish sleep.

In the morning, with a suddenness of a monsoon rain, Ulemet awoke and began to weep, crying out with loud, chest-shaking sobs until the poison in her soul had bled out.