. This time it was the Short Story competition, so we were allowed 2500 words and were given a genre, subject and a character. Other than that the rules were similar to the
Edge of the End
A warrior struggles to protect his children, feed his people and defend his homeland from the increasingly diabolical weapons of an evolving, elusive enemy.
---
The trouble with living in darkness is you can’t see where it stops. The sickness was the first sign, like a beacon burning on a mound, that there could ever be an end to our beautiful, endless night.
We had been at war with the whites for as long as our history could remember. Since the first division that spawned our prolific race, they had made it known that they intended to destroy us. It was because we were corrupt, they said. We did not live a holy life. We were shallow and lacked honor. No fealty, they said, infidels all.
We did not fear them, not back then. Skirmishes occurred constantly, but they were little more than a predictable annoyance. The fools would line up to fight in a wide line on the horizon. We could see their flashing shields coming from ever so far off. Even once they’d mastered disguise, infiltrated our ranks and walked among us, unnoticed for nights before launching an attack, they barely hurt us. If they made at all it was usually a flesh wound, never a fatal blow. The occasional maiming was the best they could manage.
They couldn’t even kill our children, though the cowards would try. The alarm would go off daily in the schools. Sometimes it would be a drill, more often an actual attack. Our babies were valiant and always drove them out. We were proud of the effectiveness of our offspring, repelling the invading whites though they were just hours old, but we expected their success. They were made of us, after all, and we could not be killed.
Or so we thought.
No one believed we’d be defeated by the whites. No one believed we’d be defeated by anything. Well, no one but Joe, of course. But nobody ever listened to Joe. He was a vegetarian, for darkness’ sake.
He would chastise us for our consumption of flesh. We’d laugh. “Oh, shut up and eat your fungus, Joe!”
“We only have a finite amount of natural resources,” Joe protested. “Much longer, and you won’t even have a choice. Too many of us are reproducing too fast. If we continue at this rate, there simply won’t be enough flesh to feed us all.”
Joe didn’t find it funny when I offered to eat his share in the meantime.
“If we run out,” I said, “we can always move on.”
I was tired of the metropolis anyway. It felt wrong – all of us crammed into one place when there was so much world to discover. We were an exploring race, the urge to spread ran deep in our cells. In my youth, I had been leader of several scouting parties, spawning divisions that established our race in satellite communities ranging from the Thymas in the North to as far South as the Patells.
That was before the sickness. There was little exploration now. We did not have the energy.
The first wave was subtle. To the strong like myself it could do little more than fatigue; others it crippled or rendered infertile. The children bore the worst of it. It slowed their growth, deforming them. Progress ground to a halt. Buildings stood half complete, exploring parties stayed in their tents for nights, too tired to venture onward, too sick to return home.
Then the wave receded. Our energy returned, construction resumed and exploration continued. Yet things were not the same. The vegetation was disappearing. Whole fields of fungus were obliterated overnight and the sugar was in short supply. Oh, the jokes we shared then at poor Joe’s expense!
“Looks like you’ll have to join us at the big kid’s table now, Joe!” I teased. But he refused to feed with us. He would hold out, he said, until the sugar returned.
The sugar did not return. The sickness did.
The poison spread, infiltrating our food. We became lethargic, unable to work. Reproduction attempts were slow, some altogether unsuccessful. My newest babies took four nights to reach maturity. One of them died before before he had reproduced. That was unforgivable. The whites had taken not just his life, but his immortality.
In the past, such a sin would have been spared us, even by the corrupt standards of the whites. They had expanded despicable to a new dimension. I sent an ambassador to their leaders informing them of my loss, identifying it as the war crime it was. They made an empty promise to ‘investigate the incident,’ and that was the last communication I ever received.
We died, in the meantime, hundreds in hours, thousands in nights. Chaotic, pointless, untargeted and nameless death.
The pattern continued. The whites would disappear with each cycle, returning only once the sickness had receded. They would attack and begin infiltrating again until the next wave of poison came. Then the cowards would retreat to watch from afar while the genocide swept through us like an unstoppable acid.
The best of us were dying: our generals, bastion leaders, forage captions. In one night, I lost more mature babies than I could name, assuming our society would ever do anything so pointless as to provide our offspring names.
Only Joe had a name, and that was only because he was a pariah of his own making. More accurately, he was a dying pariah of his own making. He still refused to eat flesh and was slowly starving to death.
The news from the North was worse. The Follics had been completely wiped out. Their water supply had been poisoned, the acidic sludge had drained into the smooth planes of the Palates, bursting through the surface in oozing boils.
West of us, the reports were better. The water was clean, our scouts reported, the food was fresh. We sent a delegation to the Pancras asking them to divert a portion of their supply in our direction in return for our labor. We offered to construct a barrier of protection between them and the dangerous whites, in exchange for the run off of their overabundant supply. They respectfully declined our 'innovative but unservicable offer.'
“The whites are not our enemy. We have no need of defense against them and do not make it a practice of bartering our natural resources for the services of warmongers.” I read the Pancras' heartless reply in our nightly circular through bitter, hungry lips.
“Warmongers! We're starving to death!”
We’re not supposed to have favorite children. For years I never did. How could I, when they all looked the same? But the sickness had stunted one of my own, leaving him half the size of the rest of us, though just as identical. It was he who spoke. It was an unending joy to me to hear my own bravado, the warrior words of my youth being spoken in his tiny, high-pitched voice.
I picked up the circular and read the rest of the article. “The republic of Pancras, however, freely extends their deepest sympathies for your current turbulence and offers their moral support without the necessity of recompense.”
“Right,” my favorite snorted. “Like we can live on that.”
The whites continued their elusive maneuvers, intent on leveraging their effective new strategy until it had destroyed us all. Three, four missions in a row, we burst into the very rooms where our intelligence had proved they were hiding, and we found nothing. Where were they? How were they controlling the sickness? How were they poisoning us?
I awoke one night and heard one, rumbling through the walls of my trench. When I pulled the plaster away and dug the bastard out, he rushed straight forward five steps, then spun in a circle and collapsed on the ground. I stared down at the white body in disbelief. It was dead.
“It’s not them,” Joe's voice rasped behind me.
“What?”
“They’re dying, just like we are. The earth is turning on us, for our voracious consumption of her flesh. She will kill us all. We are no different to her - the whites, the Follics, the Palates, the Pancras, even us. Beware! The darkness bleeds! This is the end of the black, the edge of the night! We are parasites, parasites all!”
I ran. I couldn’t hear another word and keep my sanity. He was delirious from hunger. He didn't know what he was talking about. He was wrong, he had to be. Of course he was. After all, it was Joe. No one listened to Joe.
I ran from the trench to my outpost on the wall. I found my favorite, pacing, waiting for me on the watch.
If there is a single constant through all planes of existence, it’s the obvious truth that a miniature version of anything is automatically adorable. This little child of mine was no different. He cheered me.
“Why don’t they show themselves, the dirty cowards? I want to punch a white, just one,” my favorite cried, scanning the dark for a sign of their approach. “Bam! Right in the face.”
“So do I,” I told him. “Almost as much as I want to win the whole damn war.”
The cycle of sickness stopped. We awaited its return at the now predictable time, but it did not arrive. I waited a night. Just to be safe, I waited two. Nothing. On the third, I caught a near-forgotten scent in the air. Sugar! I ran for Joe. I wanted him now, wanted him to hear it first.
“Joe!” I found him in the back of a cave, collapsed against a wall. I gathered his limp body in my arms. “Joe! Wake up. The sugar is back! You were wrong, it’s not the end of night. Joe? Joe!”
But this time it was Joe who wasn’t listening. He was dead.
Two nights later the lasers began.
Ugly, golden swords of light that could not be blocked or deflected sliced into us from above and below, down from the dome and up from the ground. They came from out of the very flesh, our very food. These new lights did not kill; they maimed. One hit my favorite, my perfect, beautiful duplication in miniature. It turned my child into a monster. He could no longer walk upright. He could only skitter, crablike and sideways across the ground. I could not bear to hear the noise of him shuffling through the trenches. I sent him away.
We abandoned our outposts, retreated from the trenches and fled from our central metropolis. Reports from the West indicated no laser activity had occurred there. We had no choice now but to rely on the dubious mercies of Pancras. We marched in that direction until we could go no farther without rest and concentrated ourselves in a large cavern. The use of the cave was not for any strategic defensive purpose, but simply because we were afraid. We would rather face the end together in the dark, than to die alone in the terrible fire of those hideous rays of light.
The sound came first. A pop, then a rip as if someone was tearing the sky apart. Above us, a small dot of light burned down through the top of the cave. The dot extended into a thin sliver that cut a glowing straight line of light into the blackness. The light expanded, stretching from the rent it had carved in the dome of the dark, as if it would encompass the full expanse of the top of the world.
I knew then that Joe had been right. This was the end, the bleeding edge of the night.
Another instant and we were flooded, the horrible light burning open our flesh. A gigantic silver sword came down through the gash in the black. The blade dissected the cave, revealing us as a single, huddled mass.
We did did not run. It would have been futile. Where could one hide in such an insidious vacuum of full exposure? I clutched my newest baby to my chest, my last, tiny, precious division and shielded her from the burning glare. My mouth opened to pray but I never got the chance.
Everything went white.
---
“Mrs. Terragaea?” Doctor Rhea Winston approached a worried looking woman in her mid-forties, who lifted her tired eyes up to the hovering surgeon.
“Yes?” The woman breathed out the word, her breath fetid with fear.
The surgeon smiled. “Your son is stable and resting comfortably. We have every reason to believe we have removed the tumor in its entirety. We’ll do a scan in a couple weeks, but I’m prepared to say your son is in remission.”
“He better be,” Mrs. Terragaea said. “First the chemo, then the radiation and now you’ve had to cut him open. Did you know, he gave up sugar completely? Wouldn’t even have a piece of cake on his birthday.” Her wet eyes met the surgeon’s. “No child should have to fight this kind of war.”
