The Void and the Shadow: The Prophecy

[feotakahari]

Setting up the plot.

It didn’t take long to gather up the rest of the Church. We were isolated, but we did have Internet. Many of us had already seen the accounts of towns and districts cut off from the world, visible but somehow unreachable, while half-rotting figures killed everyone inside. We were all desperate for an explanation.

The Void is our mother, Tuwotahl began. She is nothing. She birthed almost everything. She loves all that is not her.

The Shadow is strange. The Void didn’t birth it. It appeared. It hates complexity. It prefers identical people to people who are different. It prefers no life at all to identical people. In the end it wants no worlds. No stars. No Void. Nothing at all but Shadow.

We fought it with this. She held up the shard. We trapped it. The Seventh Legion had a prophecy that said it would escape. A Savior would come and destroy it forever.

“What if I’m not your Savior?” Allie interrupted.

Then your world will die.

Images flashed through my mind, brief glimpses of blue-haired women fighting blue-haired zombies.

The Seventh Legion had several candidates. They were ready to fight the Shadow. They died. We looked for Saviors on other worlds. Those Saviors died. Our world died with them.

They said I was too young to fight or search. I stayed until the Shadow tore down our shelter. I followed its army through a portal here. I may be the last one who knows the prophecy.

Maybe the Savior won’t know the prophecy. Maybe she’s on a world I’ve never seen. But I’m alive. I’ll fight the shadow. Whether I win or die is up to fate. What’s your fate?

“Fuck, I’ll do it,” Allie said. “I don’t care about your prophecy, but those things were hurting people. When I stopped them, it felt good, like I was doing what I was supposed to be doing my whole life. Just give me a real weapon and tell me who to hit with it.”

Tuwotahl opened up a portal with the shard. Follow.

“Not alone,” I said before I could stop myself.

Tuwotahl made a wordless exclamation of confusion, and the portal vanished.

“Not alone,” I repeated, forging ahead as if I knew what I was doing. “You’re fighting the literal Devil and his army of zombies, and you’re doing it with two people? Why not three? Or four, or five, or all of us? I’m not your Savior, but I’m here to help. Who’s with me?”

The first to step up was Nina, another girl from the Church. We didn’t have much in common, but I knew her casually just from proximity. “I--I’ll go,” she said. “I want to do this.”

The next was Mr. Pritchard, one of the history teachers from the school. “You need some adults on this.”

“I don’t think I can fight,” Father Hayes said, gesturing with his cane. “But if there’s anything else you need me for, I’ll do my best. If nothing else, I can offer you food and a spare room whenever you come back.”

More and more people volunteered, and Tuwotahl just smiled at us. I understand. Perhaps this is your fate too.

If I’d thought harder then, I might have realized what the Savior really was.

The Armory

On the other side of Tuwotahl’s portal, there was a windowless concrete room filled wall-to-wall with weapons. The floor was dusty, but the weapons themselves looked recently polished.

“Huh,” Allie commented. “Not a lot of guns.”

The Shadow won’t run from a gunshot, Tuwotahl explained. The noise draws more and more. Save your shots for an emergency. Then run for your life.

“Fair enough,” Allie said. She wandered off to the side, investigating a staff with blades at either end.

I took more of an interest in what wasn’t there. Over here, an empty space among a set of absurdly large swords. Over there, a missing warhammer, one of the smaller ones. (Tuwotahl’s? It did look small compared to these massive hunks of metal.) Which of these spaces were empty by design, and which had been claimed by failed Saviors?

The Savior candidates’ weapons are on display in the shelter, Tuwotahl told me. A memorial for the fallen. It’s very far from here. The Shadow already found it.

“Did you just read my mind?” I asked.

She chuckled. Have no fear. I can’t receive unless you send. I followed where your eyes looked. She hefted her warhammer one-handed, like it was just a tiny stick rather than a massive metal implement. I took this from the display when the Shadow attacked. I knew the woman who used it. She was kind. She deserved better. All of them did.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I couldn’t think of what else to say.

It was fate, she said simply. I try not to get angry about it. Sometimes I fail.

In the background, I could hear Allie and Nina arguing over who would get the bladed staff. It sounded like Nina was winning. To avoid both the noise and the uncomfortable discussion, I wandered over to the projectile weapons, and Tuwotahl followed. Past the guns and the longbows, just before some kind of throwing blades, I found the other love of my life: an incredibly tiny crossbow.

“How would you even kill a zombie with this?” I asked out loud.

Poison, Tuwotahl said. Fast-acting. One shot makes them unable to move. Two or three may stop a heart.

“You can poison a zombie?” I asked.

They’re alive in a sense. Their hearts still beat. But it’s simpler to crush their skulls.

Mr. Pritchard was nearby, carefully examining a long-barreled rifle. Tuwotahl turned to say something to him, but I interrupted. “What kind of poison is it? Is it a painkiller, or something more like curare, where you’re immobile but you still feel pain? And how do you make it?”

I’ve seen the plant it’s made from, Tuwotahl told me. I could show it to you. But why would you want this tiny toy?

“It’s quiet, it’s ranged, it’s lightweight, and you said one shot can stop a zombie,” I told her. “The bolts look simple enough to make, too. I just need a ready supply of poison to make it practical. And maybe a dosage guide. Though if the goal is to kill zombies, there’s nothing inherently wrong with a high dosage . . .”

Tuwotahl was staring at me. So were Allie and Mr. Pritchard. The Church members weren’t bothered, though. They were used to me by now.

You have to understand the way I worshiped. The way to understand Rembrandt is to look at Rembrandt’s paintings. The way to understand God is to look at the world. But the world’s awfully big, and you’d have to be God yourself to understand everything in it. So I focused in on the biological and chemical actions that make living things function. And in biochemistry, I particularly loved to learn about medicine, and what substances could make you sick or repair your injuries.

This was why I wasn’t homeschooled like everyone else in the church. Father Hayes decided early on that I needed better instruction than they could provide.

You keep surprising me, Tuwotahl finally said. I’ll bring you a book of herbology. I’ll need to translate it for you.

“Thank you, Miss Tuwotahl,” I told her. I held up the crossbow. “In the meantime, is there anywhere I can practice firing this thing?”

The First Mission

We couldn’t delay long to learn how to use our weapons. Many of the school survivors had family or friends in one of the areas under attack by the zombies. One called his family, but couldn’t get an answer. Another refused to call--“What if the zombies hear it ring?” Tuwotahl was worried for our safety, of course, but Allie was determined to help, and in the early days, Tuwotahl rarely overruled her.

We chose one girl at random. I didn’t know her well, and I’ve forgotten her name. Tuwotahl let her use the shard to make a portal to her home.

Stay nearby, Tuwotahl reminded us. I can portal us out. Then she led us through the portal, and we followed.

We exited into a suburban dining room, split almost down the middle. The side we were on was torn and ransacked. There was a chair split on the floor, stained with thick black blood across the back. But the far side of the room was untouched. Whoever had fought here, there was a line they’d avoided crossing.

Allie tried to walk across the line. I didn’t understand what happened, but somehow she was turned around, walking back towards us. She turned and tried to cross again, and was turned back again. She paused for a few seconds, then slowly, slowly backstepped towards the line, and suddenly she was backstepping away from it.

No one can leave without a portal, Tuwotahl told her. Not until we kill the Shadowtouched.

Allie started to say something, but she was interrupted by a sound I’d never heard before, a sort of panting screech, like someone was trying to scream at the same time they were sobbing.

I followed it into the living room. It came from the girl who lived in the house. She was staring at the blood on the floor. Some black, most red, all dried. There was an awful lot of it. How much blood had been lost here? I didn’t think a single person could bleed this much and still live. But if there were two people, maybe both . . . no, maybe one . . . No, I was lying to myself. The girl already knew what had happened here. That’s why she was making that sound.

Most of the time, I’m good at not caring. I can remember the blood and the pain like it wasn’t real or didn’t matter. But on the bad nights, sometimes I hear that sound.

Someone else heard it, too, because through the living room window, I heard a voice begin to sing. It was low and rich, and I couldn’t understand the words. It seemed to harmonize with the girl’s sobbing.

Then it turned into a shriek of undiluted rage, and my knees buckled.

Portal! Now! Tuwotahl called.

The voice from outside was still shrieking, and the girl was shrieking with it. She’d fallen just like me, but unlike me, she wasn’t getting up. Somehow, I knew she wasn’t going to. The voice had found a pain as great as its own. It was never going to let her go.

I stumbled to the window and forced it open. There were innumerable figures standing on the grass and in the street. Most of them were rotting, bloody, or both. But my blurring vision and pounding ears could still tell there was one they were centered around, leading this demented composition.

I aimed the pocket crossbow, and I took the shot.

I meant to hit it in the chest, but I aimed too high. The bolt pierced through its throat and silenced it forever.

Tuwotahl had to carry me back to the portal. Allie carried the other girl. I wasn’t unconscious. I couldn’t process what I’d just seen and done.

The other girl stayed at the church from then on. She never went out to hunt zombies again. As for me, I was out hunting again two days later. The creatures--the people--that had done this had to be fought. Not fear nor sorrow nor the Sixth Commandment would stand in my way.