Serial - Part 2 (OC)

Serial (Part 2 – Generation Kid)

Mandy Williams was a Gen 1 kid, the first batch of humans birthed after humanities exodus from Earth. The first face she ever saw was the metallic face plate of a medical assistance bot, her first solid food reconstituted protein paste. Earth, as far as she was concerned, was just another tomb in the long list of celestial corpses humanity had passed on their long exile through the universe. Her mother remembered it though. She had been just a girl when the calamity came and the atmosphere burned but she had managed to save a book from her old home before the evacuation ships took her and every other child on her block.

The book had an engraving of a tree on its cover. Its pages were sealed in plastic wrap, each one holding a different earth flower, dried and preserved next to a drawing of it as it had been alive. When Mandy was a kid she had loved that book and the stories of Earth that was. She imagined that someday she would go back there and see the flowers alive and lay in them under the light of a single brilliant star. But that had been before she had gotten older and seen the videos of the planet awash in a sea of white fire. Before she learned that humanity wasn’t all flowers and sunshine. She was fourteen now and, despite what her father claimed, an adult and she was old enough to know that most people, even ones of her own species, were pretty much shit.

This was exactly why, when Dow asked her to sneak out with him and his pals in defiance of her father’s curfew, she had agreed. Dow was Kelesh, his long thin body covered in flexible plates that shined silver in the white lights of Keleshia’s moons. Each of his limbs were longer than Mandy’s whole body and his beaked head reminded her of eagles, if you were to dunk one into quick silver and lodge some amethysts in its eye sockets.

Dow was also one of the cool kids and Mandy was old enough to know you don’t pass up an opportunity to join their circles, even if you were only invited because you happened to be a member of a species with a total population in the low hundreds. Add in the bonus that Mandy was one of the first kids cleared to enter the main Keleshi school system and it hadn’t taken long for Dow to scoop her up as his personal token human. At least, that was her theory, Dow never said as much but she was old enough to know the game. Sure, maybe she was a freak to them, as she often suspected, but hanging with them meant she was their freak which was a significant step up for a member of a refugee species.

This night she had waited until she heard her father snoring in his room before she slipped out the bedroom window. Dow was already below, his long arms spread wide to catch her. “Come on felon,” he said. She noted that Brixo was also down there, a Norviegi with a short stature, furry head and long pointed ears like a bat. As was Friss, one of the long necked Theolisians that Mandy had secretly nicknamed Brontosauruses. She jumped without hesitation, trying to suppress a laugh as her stomach flipped up into her chest. Dow caught her as easily as she would a falling kitten and set her down.

“Hey guys,” she said in Kelesh, voice breathy from the fall.

“Sup meat sack,” Dow responded and she punched him lightly in the stomach, which had about as much of an effect and punching steel.

“Careful Dow,” Brixo said, smiling and revealing too many rows of jagged teeth, “The human’s got fangs.”

“So, what are we doing tonight?” Mandy asked, pushing a stray lock of mousy brown hair from her equally mousy brown eyes. Dow looked at Friss who looked at Brixo, each sharing a conspiratorial grin. Mandy frowned, “What is it? What are you guys planning?”

Dow was the one who answered, clasping a silver clawed hand down on Mandy’s thin shoulder, “Tonight, we are taking you to the club.”

---

The “Club” as it turned out, was a squat stone building on the outside edge of the Zerha residential zone. Zerha had been abandoned and left to rot at some point in the last thousand years, a casualty of the Kelesh expansions onto colony worlds, and recently refurbished to take on the new human inhabitants of Keleshia. This building, however, had yet to receive the gentrifying touch.

Weeds sprouted from cracks in the walls, cobbled together from green and black rock in the Keleshi fashion all leading up to a domed roof. The field surrounding it was overgrown with the violet grasses native to the planet, filling the air with their sweet, meaty scents that always smelled a bit like bacon to Mandy.

“This,” Dow said, sweeping a hand to the ruin, “is our place.”

“People say it was abandoned five hundred years ago,” Friss said, elegantly marching beside Mandy and taking one step for every four Mandy took. “We used to use it as a place to get away from the families.”

“And a place to bite a scruff,” Brixo added, arching two furry eyebrows in Mandy’s direction and earning himself a punch as well.

“What do you mean used to?” Mandy asked. “You guys don’t come here anymore?”

“Not for a while,” Friss said, “A hole in the ground isn’t as much fun once your old enough to go to the entertainment districts.”

“But if you’re going to be one of us now you gotta see it,” Brixo added.

Despite herself, Mandy was excited. It was a shit hole, yeah, but it was their shit hole and if they brought her here it meant they trusted her. “But, how do you get in?” she asked, trying to sound unimpressed. There was no front door on the building. Modern Kelesh buildings, as with most structures in the Consortium, featured cavernous entry portals to accommodate a large number of species.

“This place is pre-Consortium. Entrance is on the roof,” Dow said, gesturing to a small chimney like portal at the apex of the domed roof. “You forget we fly?” he asked, spreading his arms for show. From the bottom of each, like a roll of carpet a web of thin silver threads dangled until he flexed and they snapped into place, forming thin, gauzy wings and Mandy couldn’t help but smile. Kelesh wings were beautiful, like spider silk cut from diamonds.

“You do, bird brain,” Mandy corrected, “How are us aerodynamically challenged supposed to get in?”

“Chill,” Brixon said, “There is a back door. How else could we get Friss’s fat ass in there?”

“Or your ego,” Friss said coolly, marching forward, her thick neck bobbing side to side in clear agitation. Mandy shot Brixo a playful glare and followed Friss, half jogging to keep up.

Dow guided them around to the back of the building. The back “Door” as it turned out was the ruined remains of what had once been a window, its framing stones long pulled out to reveal a jagged hole in the rear wall. They all paused there, staring into the shadowed interior of the house.

“What are we waiting for?” Mandy asked.

“You first, meat bag,” Dow responded.

Friss sighed, “Can we just go inside?”

Many scoffed and sauntered in, careful not to stumble on the loose stones and make a total dweeb of herself. Inside the domed room was surprisingly large. A table had been set up as well as a mildewy cushion which Friss immediately marched towards and flopped down heavily on. Posted along the walls were advertisements and cut out centerfolds from a dozen worlds, each featuring languages and species foreign to Mandy, although some were clearly meant for “adults.” She had to suppress a snicker when she spied a large depiction of two crocodile mouthed Renjaw’s engaged in frantic, if bloody, copulation.

“Cool huh?” Brixo said. “This is like our lair.”

Mandy tucked her hands on her hips and sighed, “It is cool. But… what do you do here?”

“Well,” Brixo said, his ears twitching and flushing red, “We ah, we shoot the shit. Sometime we would play Teslo.”

“Is that it?” She asked. Brixo began to stammer a response when Dow interjected.

“It’s lame isn’t it?”

“Hey, I like it here,” Friss tried to say but Dow waved her off.

Dow shook his head. “Nah, it’s lame. I mean when we were little kids this place was awesome. We used to pretend it was a war ship or a pirate station…” he sighed, his shoulders slacking, “But, it’s just a hovel. Sorry Mandy, I thought you would like it.”

Mandy was surprised to hear the disappointment in Dow’s voice and she felt her face go hot. She hadn’t meant it like that. Not that this place wasn’t a hovel. Truth was she had spent half her life forced to study a dead world and despite her initial elation ruins didn’t do much for her. But she forced a smile to her face, “No Dow, no it’s cool. Want to give me the tour?”

Dow grinned, which for a Kelesh means tilting his head as his long, sharp beak didn’t leave much room for articulation. “Well,” he said, “This is the main room. We collected the pictures and ads when we were little.”

“Where is the dirt?” she asked bluntly. That was one bit of Keleshi biology she knew. Kelesh had to lay their eggs in dirt where their young would feed from the nutrients in the soil. Better soil meant stronger kids. If this was a Keleshi home then there would have to be dirt. Even modern homes would bring in large beds of soil when it came time to breed.

Brixon laughed, a high pitched chortling sound, “Hear that Dow? She wants you to show her the dirt.”

Dow hesitated for a moment and then gestured to the far corner. It was hard to see in the gloom but there was an earthen ramp going down beneath the main floor. “They would use the basement.”

Staring pointedly at Brixon, Mandy looped one of her arms around the considerably longer Keleshi’s. “Show me,” She said.

Dow led her obediently to the dirt ramp, both he and Mandy ignoring Brixon’s renewed chiding and Friss’s attempts to silence him. They peered down the ramp. It was narrow, the floor fading from stone to dirt. At the bottom of the ramp a rusted metal door was inset in a wall of packed earth, slightly ajar.

“Come on,” Dow said, taking the first step and tugging her along but now it was her turn to hesitate.

There was something wrong about this although she couldn’t put her finger on it. Maybe it was just nerves. Even if Dow wasn’t human he was technically a boy and a popular one at that. Besides that she liked Dow, liked the way he called her meat bag and smiled when she called him bird brain. Despite his suspected ulterior motives he had extended her a hand on her very first day in an alien school. Brought her in, given her someone to laugh with. It was, then, only natural that going into a dark basement with him had her a little nervous. Or maybe it was just the dark; she had never liked the dark ever since she was little. It wasn’t until they had descended down and faced the door that she realized what was wrong. There was a smell here. Something wet and organic.

“Blood,” she said.

“What?” Dow asked.

“I smell blood,” absently she pushed the door open the rest of the way, the dim light from above spilling into the room beyond. It took a moment for her brain to put together the scene before her, and then she gasped. The corpse of a Thelosian was on the ground, lying in the thin shaft of light from the open door. It was butchered, its many limbs stacked like cord-wood in a neat pile. Atop its head leered at them, eyes wide and glossy, its mouth opening to reveal a tongue, still curled as if caught in its final shrill syllable. Dow began to shout while Mandy’s eyes drifted numbly from the corpse to the wall where a message had been written in something thick and black.

‘Blood on the Ground’

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Hope you guys have enjoyed this.

Link to Part 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/4zl39q/serial_part_1_oc/

Link to Part 3