Artyom Dereschuk - Hate the Sin

He almost had a heart attack when he felt something grab his ankle, but when he looked down he found nothing.

Sometimes, the ever-present noise of the engines was drowned out by screams of terror and gunfire. Even though his every instinct was telling him to turn around, he wouldn’t do that—although the thought that something was tearing through the ranks of soldiers toward his exposed back was making him want to close his eyes and run away. One time, the shriek of dread and horror that reached him sounded like it was rising up into the air, and when he involuntarily turned around to check out what was going on, he managed to catch a glimpse of someone’s legs leaving the dome of light around the generator as their owner was pulled up toward the ceiling by some predator that remained unseen. The timely warning of the old man—“Do not look up!”—had saved him, and probably a dozen others, from following the unlucky soul with their eyes to the very end of his final destination and thus repeating his mistake.

Sometimes he’d see the strange inhabitants of that weird world as they’d curiously approach their band of misfits. Some of them were blind, while others had big, unseeing eyes, but all of them were colorless and meek, and whenever Homewrecker shone his light on them they squealed and ran away, their black iris-less eyes burned by the light they hadn’t seen for who knows how many millennia.

Even the flora of that bizarre underworld could not be trusted. A small grove of thin trees that happened to be on their path suddenly separated from the ground and started moving on their own. When the shocked kids illuminated them, it turned out that what they believed to be the tree’s crown was actually a long, massive body, supporting itself on thin legs that they had initially confused as the trunks.

Sometimes, they would happen upon the statues, erected in the middle of nowhere to God knows whom. Made out of jet-black, impossibly smooth stone that seemed to be sweating some unknown emulsion, they were so dark that you could see them before the light even landed on them as their incomprehensible material soaked in even the faint glow of the Underworld. The creatures that they displayed were nothing like humans, some of them wielding tools Homewrecker couldn’t grasp the true meaning of. Their large bulbous heads were connected to strangely-shaped bodies, and the only appendages in which they sometimes held their instruments, and the ritualistic clothes they wore, made it apparent that the statues weren’t meant to portray animals, but sentient creatures, capable of thought. Perhaps even the same creatures that had built that place. And looking into the spots where their eyes could be, the boy almost felt like his very mind was soaked in as well, attracted to the dark secrets those monstrosities were sure to keep.

The worst thing, however, were the rumors. They were spreading through their ranks like ripples through water, acquiring more and more details the further they passed. The General tried to stop them whenever they reached him, but he might as well have been trying to stop the soldiers from breathing. Demoralizing as they were, they were satisfying the morbid curiosity of the crowd. Of course, it didn’t help that Homewrecker and Corpse Eater were the last ones in the formation; by the time the rumors reached them, they were so outrageous that they seemed out of place even in the bizarre place they were in.

One of the soldiers passed a word that the glowing fruits that were growing everywhere on the trees were not to be touched; Defiler had approached the tree at his own risk (to bring himself back to the surface a curious souvenir) and one of the branches with the biggest fruit had turned out to be a lure. They didn’t see what exactly had pulled him away, but they mentioned that his scream ended very abruptly—as if a soundproof door had closed on him.

Another rumor told them to keep their feet away from giant flowers on the ground. One of the soldiers that stepped on one of them had gotten dissolved up to his very lungs before he could say a word. Homewrecker didn’t believe that particular one until he tripped over the soldier’s half-dissolved torso.

The rumors were the warning system of their unit. Just like in the ancient times, whenever someone had heard something, he’d pass it to the others so that they would know about the danger. Maybe sometimes it’d create an unnecessary myth or two, but that was a small cost for a glimpse into the state of things around you. If you were told that there were monsters in all three forests around you and they dwelled only in one of them you were still well-informed.

As they traversed more and more of that sunless landscape, the boy couldn’t stop thinking: did Tsetse really expect them to rush across these fields back to safety? On their own, in almost complete darkness? With no guarantee that they would find the way back or that they wouldn’t become someone’s dinner? And on top of that, he expected them to run away “when things go down”?

Even the thought of simply pulling off his light and walking five meters away from the crowd was making his stomach twist. Sure, they’d still be able to see him and he’d see them, and they would only be separated by one second’s worth of running, but he couldn’t expel the analogy of him being fishing bait out of his mind. Wouldn’t he be the same in the unseeing eyes of local fauna—an easy picking?

His very genes were telling him that it was a bad idea. That his tribe was his fortress and that he shouldn’t ever leave its premises. The night promised nothing but dangers.

As the grassy fields changed to a muddy swamp, the boy noted that he could hear the distinct sound of a running river. If Homewrecker had known Greek mythology, he’d have found it only appropriate that the unseen fields of the Underworld had their own Styx running through them.

“You hear that?” Corpse Eater nudged him with an elbow.

Homewrecker simply nodded, knowing that his friend was looking at him. He preferred to stay focused on that imaginary line that separated light and dark some twenty meters away from them. The ethereal picket fence of their little moving camp.

“I never liked the river,” Corpse Eater shared with his friend. Homewrecker said nothing; he did not support his friend’s chatty mood.

“When I was a kid my mother told me to stay away from it or the river demons would pull me under the surface,” Corpse Eater quietly continued. Throwing a quick glance at him, Homewrecker saw that his friend’s eyes were staring into distance; his mind was far away, in a comforting past at his mother’s side.

“She told me about devils with fourteen black long fingers that grabbed the bad boys who wandered too close to its river, and when the boys were found on the next day their lungs would be filled with water. And you know, when I hear this river, I think… I think that maybe my mother was right. When I see the things that walk around us I think that… maybe she was talking about this river. Maybe it’s the one she was warning me about.”

“Your mother didn’t know shit.” Homewrecker rudely interjected his friend’s train of thought and, to his relief, he saw the features of the boy next to him tense up as he snapped back to reality.

“Don’t you talk shit about my mother,” Corpse Eater snapped at him, annoyed at the rude awakening his friend had provided.

“Don’t go off on such dreamy rants then,” Homewrecker bluntly told him. “Stay focused! Please!” he pleaded with Corpse Eater. “What is wrong with you? Did you forget where we are?”

“What does it matter if we pay attention or not?” Corpse Eater suddenly said, louder than necessary. A few adults hushed at him, annoyed both by his loudness and the sentiments he was spreading. Homewrecker was taken aback as well; his friend had shown defeatist tendencies in the past, and he was quite a nihilist, but never to this extent.