A Scarred World

This is something I'm writing for English class, and it shows my inexorable love for mutants. It's not even halfway done yet, just to warn you, but it'll be finished in about two weeks, hopefully.

             Liam plodded down the asphalt road that had, over the past couple centuries, worn down into little more than gravel and dust with endless stretches of desert on either side. Though it was morning still, with hours left until noon, he could already see the heat from the day rising up in waves from the sticky, melted tar, hot enough for him to feel it though the soles of his shoes. Scraggy, stunted cacti, brave souls, indeed, to withstand such eternal torment from the sun, sparsely dotted the landscape. Despite it, Liam trudged onward, going east back to their little compound. It had been his duty this morning to travel the couple miles to the reception tower yet again. Each time, the person sent to the tower would send out a message for as far as the tower's signal reached, and each time, they would receive no response. Still, they persisted, in hopes that one day they might be found and saved from this strange, hellish land.

            As he walked, he occasionally sipped from a canteen holstered on the right side of his belt. The water in it always tasted slightly metallic, but he never complained; any type of untreated water, even fresh rainwater, contained lethal poison. Liam was one of the few remaining good specimens. They needed him. He stood nearly six feet tall and thought that, perhaps, he would grow another inch or two this year, before he turned eighteen. His skin had essentially the same caramel color of anyone else's at the compound. His short hair and insightful eyes were dark brown. He kept himself strong out of necessity, for he was one of the few that retained their full human characteristics after the change. Everyone in the compound was needed, because as far as they knew, they were the only full humans left to save the world from sinking into complete disrepair. And there were barely three hundred of them. Liam shook his head and sighed at the thought, tabling the subject for another time.

            A copse of rusty old buildings loomed before him, and he began to tiptoe through an ancient little town. He had to keep silent, because although he would never admit it to the others, he had a deathly fear of---

            Something behind him drew in a ragged, rasping breath and make a soft, faintly insectile clicking noise. Liam froze and spun slowly, bracing himself for the abomination of nature he was about to see. His heart hammered in his chest, and he forced himself not to squeeze his eyes shut. He needed to see it, to know, to understand, to be a scientist. He faced it.

            Two droopy, bloodshot eyes stared out at him from a creature adopted from a never-published tale of Edgar Allan Poe. The thing was hairless, its scabbed, greenish skin covered in boils leaking pus, its nose eaten away as if from leprosy, with no fat or muscle, only filthy rags, to conceal its brittle bones, a few of which stuck out at unnatural angles. It breathed laboriously through its mouth, and the decadent stench of its breath made Liam recoil. It stood perhaps as high as Liam's chest, and gazed up at him with adoring eyes, as though it was a lowly peasant and he were a god. He could not be entirely sure, but he thought this particular creature was female.

            Help me, it seemed to say. I need you. We need you. The pain---.

            Liam stopped this nonsense, reassuring himself that this disgustingly mutated humanoid could not have such complex thinking abilities. It simply stared at him in stupid awe. He knew more of them sat in the old buildings now, watching him closely, but he considered it bizarre that this one had dared to approach him.

            "Scuttle off now," he said to it, shooing it away with his hands. The thing tilted its head to the side and issued another soft click, completely uncomprehending.

            Liam had had enough; it would still take him twenty minutes to walk back, and he could not risk getting caught in the real heat of the day. He turned and started walking again, unsettled. The Low Ones' behavior had been peculiar lately. He thought it odd that---

            A small, rough, feverish, and vaguely slimy hand grabbed his wrist from behind, followed by another of those vile clicks. Revulsion gripped him; he whirled around and instantly lashed out, knocking the small creature to the hard ground with enough force to shatter its brittle skull like an egg. Bits of brain like rotting worms dripped out of its head, along with indigo-colored blood so denatured that even when exposed to pure air, it could not carry enough oxygen.

            Tension crackled in the air as the audience hidden in the shadows became aware of what had transpired. Their greedy eyes traversed the scene with increasing intensity, until, one by one, they began to show themselves, clicking inquisitively. Liam took a couple steps back from the diseased corpse, afraid they might attack him for the heinous crime, then looked on in horror as dozens of them converged upon the body, ripping it viciously apart, and yes, devouring their own dead. Ravenous clicks, growls, and slurps accompanied the tearing of raw meat from bone. Scabbed, arthritic hands, several with missing fingers, scrabbled for a taste, just a morsel, of precious nourishment, no matter that it came from the freshly-murdered flesh of one of their own. If they had found the month-old rotting corpse of a baby, they would have fallen upon it with the same gusto, maggots and all.

            This is not human, Liam thought, still gaping at the scene before him. This is not what humanity has come to. No god could have allowed this to happen.

            They were desperate, outdated thoughts for simpler, outdated days. Overcome with terror, he took heel and fled.

 

^*^

Roughly a kilometer down the road along which Liam had fled laid a military base inhabited by the full humans. The compound wasn’t very large but had more than enough space and resources to accommodate them all. They’d lived there since they’d banded together after the Tragedy of the 21^st Century, but their overall population was never able to increase; too much work had to be done for adults to want several children, and it was soon discovered that a large minority of the full human women were rendered sterile. Hardship had also taken its toll: dust storms ravaged the land from time to time, and anyone outside the compound would likely be swept away and lost in the desert sands. To fall and scrape one’s knee on a rock instantly invited lethal infection into the wound, and small injuries such as these had only a seventy percent survival rate even if disinfectant was applied immediately.

The very land upon which they walked was poison. Over a century ago, in that mythical time when the earth was still fertile and the pure humans still dominated the land, a terrible malaria epidemic gripped the African and South American continents. Billions perished within a single year, and little medical help was available. Mosquitoes bred rapidly in the tropical regions, and the infected humans, losing their strength and their sanity, were dying just as quickly. Scientists rushed to find a cure, a solution, anything to slow the advancing pandemic, but after two years of continued failure, turned desperate. A new, powerful pesticide was created to decimate the exponentially-growing population of mosquitoes, but the chemical’s long-term effects on humans and the environment were, of course, never tested. Blinded by panic and fear, the governments of both the affected and unaffected countries bought millions of gallons of it, and then enacted procedures to spread it over their territory. No one except the creators of it knew that it had not been tested properly, and they were now the richest men in the world. They would tell no one for decades to come.

The mosquitoes were killed�' all of them. Those infected with the disease began to recover, and it seemed as if the world would recover as well. It was a new age of technology and global prosperity. The human race was forgetting, slowly, what hunger and sickness meant as health care improved rapidly after the pandemic and more and more humanitarian help was sent to countries in need. But of course, after all this happiness, a true disaster had to shake the world.

The next generation born to those who were first exposed to the pesticide showed an alarmingly high percentage of gene mutations. One in ten children had a slight mutation: an extra toe here, a discolored eye there. One in a hundred was born with a serious defect that prevented them from functioning as part of society. The mutations only got worse from there. Of the next generation, nearly half had mutated genes. Statistics were gathered and research done, but it was too late; the mutations were unpreventable. By the end of the twenty-first century, eighty percent of the fifteen billion people in the world carried mutated genes.

The full humans living in the compound knew little to nothing of the outside world today. The harsh heat of the desert kept them from leaving this wretched place, for any vehicles they had were ancient, battery-dead, and required fuel they didn’t have. It was a miracle that they had not run out of food and water. Everyone worked for the good of the compound.

^*^

“Anything interesting out there?” the gate guard asked Liam, noticing that he was sweaty and out of breath. Actually, the guard thought, this kid looks like he’s seen a ghost.

Liam looked the guard in the face, and the guard caught a fleeting gleam of wild adrenaline in the boy’s eyes. Then they seemed calm again, returned to reality.

“I’ve got . . . things to report,” Liam said. “To Doc. He’ll want to know first.”

“Alright.”

The guard waved him through, but wondered about that look on the kid’s face. The guard had known that their precariously structured microcosm of still-human society would topple sometime; he’d just hoped it wouldn’t happen during his lifetime. He sighed. Here, when people got excited, it rarely signaled something good. He looked out down the battered street across the desert to the ancient little town in the distance, and thought he saw a cluster of tiny people swarming in a group. Swarming over something? He closed his eyes, shook his head to clear it of any conclusions he might draw, and stepped back to his post.

^*^

Author's Note

Tell me what you think. How's the gore? And tell me what you think of Liam. I can't decide whether I like him as a person or not, but seeing as he's here living in my head, I'm going to have to decide soon.

Reviews

[Katie de Lavani]

Incredible! A truly remarkable piece with captivating diction and eerie suspense. The detail was amazing. Was funny when Liam first turned around to look at the creature, I was thinking of an eight foot tall massive terror but its was even shorter than him! Still terribly ugly though. :) That third to last paragraph was particularly intense, perfectly showing their disgusting starvation. Very well done!