Chapter 23: Breeding Habits

…will require manpower. Harvest the animals around you, especially the bipeds. Our calculations say they will make excellent laborers, given the right incentives…

Douglass grimaced, rubbing his head at the nonstop litany of Tips And Tricks To Subjugate A Planet that had been on loop for the last three days. “Hey, you wanna just take that thing with you?” he demanded, shoving the blade towards the three heading up the Pass to collect weapons and gear.

It was Rusty who answered. “Keep it, doc. We need to know what they’re saying.”

“I know what they’re saying,” Douglass said, frustrated. “They’re saying we’re animals, that they’re gonna train us to build their shit for them. I haven’t been getting any sleep. Seriously, you leave it here, I’ll probably find a way to break it in half.”

Then, thinking how he might get two signals instead of just one, Douglass grimaced and added, “Or maybe just throw it down the mountain.”

“Keep it,” their brave Captain said. “Don’t throw it. We need that thing safe.”

Douglass bit his tongue on a retort, not wanting their new Ranger buddy to figure out Envy wasn’t in the military and replace his blind obedience with a few revenge bullets for good measure. After all, in an apocalypse, blind obedience from a battle-hardened badass was something to be treasured, even if he had to choke down the obvious “You aren’t in charge of me, rich girl,” responses that otherwise would have popped out like kernels of corn boiling in hot butter.

The three hale adults—the three not blind, gimped, or four years old—seemed to take his choked silence as assent, because he heard them open the door and step outside onto the porch, leaving him in the cabin with the invalids.

Time passed. The stabbing victim slept. Douglass picked lint from the bed.

He watched the girl stand and walk over to him, leaning forward to peer at his face only inches away. He could see the organs working behind her brow, the life in her skin, the pressure in her eyeballs. “Why are you blind?” The kid’s words came on a spreading wave of violet.

Because I got fucked over by God, Douglass immediately thought. “I was in an explosion,” he said. “Knocked out my senses.”

“Okay,” the little girl said, straightening. “I’m gonna go find my cat.”

“Yeah, okay.” Anything to keep her from reminding him of the fact he could see her organs but not her face.

The girl walked to the cabin, opened the door, and yanked it shut again.

Douglass frowned. “Wait, what?” He heard little snowboots crunching in the parking lot outside, getting further away. After a couple minutes, he stood. “Hey, Kelsey?!” He stumbled towards the door, fell on the end of the bed, and slammed into the wall under the window. Crawling, blindly groping at the room around him, inwardly hoping his hand didn’t land on the searing-hot stove, he eventually found the door and, with effort, figured out and manipulated the latch.

Yanking the door open, he shouted out into the cold, “Kelsey?”

“I’ve gotta get Mean!” came the girl’s distant reply, too far away. Way too far.

“Hey, no, get back here!” Douglass shouted. Rusty had taken a liking to the little girl, and he just knew the big oaf would crush him into a paste for letting her wander off alone in a world filled with flesh-eating alien dragon-larvae

“I’ll be back soon!” she shouted, a wave of yellow-orange. “I need to find her!”

“No, don’t—” Douglass said, taking a hasty step out the door. His foot missed the porch—because it wasn’t a porch, it was a staircase—and he went tumbling down the steps into the snow, ramming his nose into something hard on his way down. Sitting back up, Douglass felt out his bloody nose and skinned-up chin gingerly, determined nothing was broken, then awkwardly got to his feet. “Hey Kelsey!” he shouted in the general direction he saw the ripple effects of her orange words even then fading.

No answer.

Douglass took two more steps, tripped on whatever had hit him in the face the first time, and went down in the snow, hard. He propped himself back up, holding his wrist, and was about to try again when a bone-chilling thought occurred to him:

What if, in stumbling around looking for the girl, he lost his way back to the cabin? As it was, he could only barely see the yellow glow of the convalescent woman in the bed, and he wasn’t sure where the door was because he saw through the walls. As it was, the woman looked like she was floating above the squirming layer of alien maggots under the house.

Maggots. That was an uncomfortable thought, both being alone with them, blind and weaponless, and how the little girl would fare against them, alone and weaponless.

It was clear to Douglass, however, if he went wandering much further from the cabin and lost sight of the floating woman inside, he would be lost for good, and the scavenging party would return to a frozen corpse curled up against the base of the steps, three feet from the door.

Very carefully, Douglass walked around whatever had been tripping him and shuffled back to the staircase and carefully climbed back up inside. After some maneuvering, he managed to find the door, shut it, and latch it again. Then he stumbled back to the chair by the far window, praying he didn’t hit the potbelly stove with his kneecaps.

In the background, the alien ‘radio’ seemed to be mocking him. The animals are clumsy and slow, both in body and mind—once grown, you will be able to outmaneuver them and outwit them, never fear my children. A few of you may die at first, but your ultimate supremacy here is unquestioned…

Douglass slumped into the chair and glared at the dagger that seemed to be mocking him. “What do you know of it?” he muttered, wiping blood from his nose.

Well, Doug, it’s clear their brains are limited to only basic impulses, completely devoid of the transcebral senses, which gives us a clear advantage in tactics, learning, and basic communications, namely negotiations and master-slave relationships.

Douglass’s mouth fell open. For a long time, he just stared at the ‘dagger’, which swirled with orange fire in his sight. Swallowing hard, he said, “I guess it does, doesn’t it.” Then, because he wasn’t entirely sure the trauma of the last few days wasn’t lending to some sort of psychosis or delusion, he said, “But, I mean, you keep saying we’ll be able to walk among them without being detected. Why wouldn’t they be able to detect us? The differences between our species are obvious.”

Clearly, Doug, you have not yet grown into your full capabilities and are still trapped in pre-adolescence. Ask again once you’ve sufficiently grown in size and find you are able to transform your material body to accommodate your immortal will and we will immediately engage upon teaching you how to control said shifts. Until then, all discussion is merely theoretical until you survive to adulthood, and once grown, you will learn best by doing, rather than by lecture, so further explanation is moot.

For a very long time, Douglass just stared at the flaming orange device that Rusty had left for him on the nightstand. Shapechangers, he thought. “Great,” he muttered. “Fucking great.”

We are pleased that you are excited to begin your transformation process, Doug, the dagger told him with the terse-yet-mindless chatter of an AI squirrel. However, you must first prove your merit in the Thinning. Once you have survived to adolescence, your chances of survival radically increase, and thus it makes more sense for us to wait until after the Thinning to talk to you directly, despite your demonstrated prodigiousness at such an early stage of development.

Doug squinted. “How many of us are there out there?” He thought maybe a few million, considering the state of the ground.

At current count? One quadrillion, though that number will obviously decrease as you and your brethren vie for dominance and body mass. Ultimate estimates are approximately seven thousand adults of breeding size before your father returns to claim you.

“Claim us?” Douglass blurted.

He must choose breeding stock to rekindle his civilization, the dagger told him, as if it were utterly obvious. Hence the Thinning and the ultimate survival of only the most viable soul-candidates. Do you not remember the Collapse?

“Huh?”

Truly, Candidate Doug, your enthusiasm is appreciated, but until you have survived the Thinning and achieved adolescence, the chances of your survival are unbelievably miniscule, regardless of your remarkable development, and you are wasting valuable resources with your questions, not to mention precious time you could be using to consume other soul-candidates.

Douglass’s mouth hung open slightly, then he slowly closed his jaw.

“You look like a gaping fish,” a voice croaked from the bed, in a shimmer of strong yellow.

Douglass turned to look at the woman, whose body was ablaze in robust, flowing energies. Despite her convalescent state, her body—or was it her spirit, he realized, stunned?—looked as healthy as the Ranger. “Morning,” he said.

She squinted at him. “Sun’s not out.”

Of course it wasn’t out. Because he was blind and those fuckers woke him up and left before dawn because they were OCD ever-ready early-riser gogogo types that had left before dawn and not even mentioned it. Bastards.

Ever since becoming a doctor and getting a cushy EMT slot, he had always gone for the evening shift. Fuck getting up early. He was one of those types that liked to have his alarm go off at nine, throw it across the room, and cuddle back into his fluffy blankets until the noon sun blasted him out of bed. He was a night owl, dyed and true, and he hated early risers.

Then again, his circadian rhythm wasn’t going to do him much good if he couldn’t see what the fucking sun was doing, was it?

“You blind or something?” the woman asked bluntly.

Douglass, who was getting really sick of that question, said, “I sewed up your wounds, didn’t I?”

“Did you?” She sounded like she didn’t believe him. Because he was blind.

Doug hated his life.

“Look,” Douglass said, “I can see some stuff. Got hit in a blast by that alien ship as it was leaving. It changed something in my head, that’s all I know. Can’t see light anymore, but I can see sounds and…” he hesitated, thinking of the roiling fire inside the dagger, “…something else.”

She gave an unladylike grunt at he heard the springs squeak as she sat up in bed. “Where’s the little girl?”

“The three preppers went on a pre-dawn foraging mission and once they were out of earshot, your friend decided to go wander off looking for her cat.” He gestured to his face. “I tried to stop her, but the ground punched me in the face.”

“You should’ve said something!” Immediately, the floorboards squeaked as she put weight on them, and he saw her blazing yellow body stretch out as she stood.

“Hey!” Douglass cried, jumping to his feet. “You need to stay in bed!”

“Make me, little man.”

That was really something, coming from an Asian chick the size of his kneecap. He glowered at her, but wasn’t about to pick a fight with someone who, to all appearances, had gotten into an all-out brawl with Special Ops and come out with nothing but a couple of stab wounds. He heard her come close, then awkwardly pass him as she limped her way to the door.

“Wise man,” she commented, when he didn’t say anything or try to reach for her. “When they get back, tell them I went down the hill looking for the girl.” He heard her press the latch to open the door.

Feeling compelled by his Hippocratic Oath to stop a weak and wounded woman from dying in a snowbank, he blurted, “You know, it’s really not a good idea for you to—”

She slammed the door on him.

Listening to the silence of the cabin around him, feeling nothing but the lonely, crackling fire behind him, Douglass found himself really hoping that Envy hadn’t been bullshitting him when she promised him sex for a week of survival. At this point, that was really the only reason he was still holding on. Sex with a pretty girl before he died. That would be nice.

Then again, Sir Army Ranger had burst onto the scene like a knight in shining armor, waving his manliness around like a foot-long cock, and now he was out there with her, supplying her with all the goodies she would need to survive the Apocalypse unscathed. Douglass could tell by where his voice came from that he was tall, he was sharp as a tack—in a sand-pounding, gun-toting, I’m Gonna Kill You If You Look At Me Funny sort of way—and he had that smooth charisma of someone who could make women smile. Tall, charismatic, smart…

Fuck, what if the fucker was pretty, too?

Desperate, Douglass stumbled to the door and yanked it open. “Hey!” he cried out into the snow.

“Not stopping me, little man,” the Asian woman called back from the distance.

“Tell me something before you leave!” Douglass said.

Floating in the white noise ahead of him, the woman hesitated. “Tell you what?”

“You know that Army Ranger?” Douglass asked. “The one whose buddy you killed?”

“What about him?” She sounded suspicious.

“Is he pretty?” Douglass asked. Then, quickly, “I mean, in a manly, I-want-you-to-fuck-me sort of way.”

There was a really long pause before he heard her grin as she said, “Yeah, he’s pretty.” She hesitated. “I think he goes for chicks, though.”

Douglass felt his jaw drop. “No, I’m not—”

“Can’t stay and chat, little man!” she called. “We can talk Ranger abs and man-titties later!”

Man…titties? Fuuuuuuck, so he worked out, too. Fuck. God, this sucked. “I’m not gay!” Douglass shouted after her.

“Yeah, yeah. Later!” Her voice was almost swallowed by the sound of…a blizzard? Douglass looked up, felt cold and wet sprinkle his face.

Well…shit. What a glorious day to be a blind man anxiously waiting on his only sources of warmth, food, and protection to come back from getting trapped in a goddamn snowstorm during which his only hope of ever getting laid is potentially having to huddle with a manly Special Ops badass for warmth…

And just wait until Mandy went and told the others of how he wanted descriptions of abs and man-titties…

“I’m not!” he shouted out to her.

No answer.

Douglass pulled his head back inside the cabin and shut the door. Leaning his head against the rough-hewn lumber of the door, he muttered, “She thinks I’m gay. Jesus Christ, they’re all gonna think I’m a butt boy.”

From the blessed silence behind him came, Reproductive deficiency will not be tolerated after the Thinning, Doug. Only those Candidates capable of producing children will be allowed to advance. If you are finding yourself having trouble copulating with those of the opposite sex, you should hone your skills, lest you be passed over for a colony position.

“Thank you,” Douglass said bitterly.

Anything to help our Candidates become the best they can be, the neurotic AI squirrel tittered happily. Simply ask if you need any other assistance—we’re always here.

Douglass shuddered and resisted the urge to find rope for a noose. Instead, he went over to a corner, sat down, and listened to the fire crackle as the dagger resumed its regularly-scheduled programming…

…and once you have sustainable breeding populations, all wild versions should be eradicated to maintain the purity of domesticated genetic lines…

The end of the world, Douglass realized, upon hearing to his own species yet again described as a slightly more useful form of cattle, is really going to suck.