EARTH
Muffled screaming rang out from the man in the center of the room. It rebounded throughout the room and escaped into the cold night air. The man was in the center of the room, bound to the chair by heavy ropes. A pool of blood lay at his feet, soaking into the half rotting wooden floor. A boy stood at the window, gazing out over the fields of wheat, illuminated by the silver shine of the moon. He was 12 but he looked no older than 8. Holes in the T-shirt exposed the boy's ribs, their imprints protruding against his skin. His legs were spindly, barely strong enough to support his weight. His face sagged with exhaustion, distorted with the scars of abuse. Yet his eyes were something else. The cold mixture of intelligence and ruthlessness gave them a beautiful sheen. In his left hand, he held a dull, rusted knife, and in his right, he held a large, iron pan. Rust had long ago laid its claim on both tools, dulling the blade's edge and the pans shine, yet they were serving their purpose beautifully. He turned back towards the man in the chair. Tears mixed with blood and streamed down his face. The agony on his face, it was so blissfully satisfying. It was as if some roaring beast that had been clawing into his heart had finally been satiated. He had never been happier. He limped over, the pan’s weight forcing his steps to be lopsided. It was almost funny. Noticing the boys approaching footsteps, the man screamed and wailed. He struggled with all his might only to no avail. The boy had waited months for this moment. No shoddy knot tying was going to stop him.
3 police officers, two men and a woman burst through the door, their handguns raised. Normally they would have given the courtesy of knocking were it not for the horrific stench that came from inside. While they were only rural officers who had seen far less violence than some of their colleagues in the inner city, they knew it well enough. The stench of a fresh corpse. The hinges and door, both worn away by age, gave no resistance. The door swung away only to reveal the gruesome scene within. It was one they would remember for the rest of their lives.
There was a man tied down to a chair, naked if not for his underwear. However, the longer the officers looked at the man's body, the harder it became for them to understand what they were seeing. Long gashes had been cut into the man's flesh with what looked like a dull knife. They crisscrossed his torso and limbs and the blood they oozed left long stains in the man's skin. As the officers' gazes traveled across the man, they fell open his horribly mutilated arms. Chunks of flesh were missing at random, as if someone had left a child with a spoon and some jello. These cuts were so deep that the muscles, the ligaments, the bones, they were all exposed. His fingers, so horribly mutilated and bent that they no longer resembled digits so much as letters of the alphabet. Their gazes traveled farther up, to the man's face. The darkness of the night spared the officers the image, but the flash of white bone was unmistakable.
The gruesome image combined with the smell of decaying wood and blood was too much to bear. The female officer was the first to break, turning away from the scene with shaking legs only to collapse onto the ground and spill the contents of her stomach. The lead officer and his partner, assaulted by the new smell of bile, broke the last vestiges of their resistance. They surrendered to their disgust and emptied their stomachs. Through the fog of fear in their minds, they understood one thing: the person that had done this, they were a monster. A being incapable of empathy. If such a thing were to be left free…
The female officer ran towards the cruiser and radioed for back up, while the two male officers rampaged through the derelict home, searching for the perpetrator. As the female officer ran back towards her colleagues, she heard the soft crying of a child.
It was a boy no more than 8 years old. For a second she was shocked. What was a boy doing at the scene of such a viscous murder? Then her training kicked in, he was most likely an innocent bystander left alone simply because the murder hadn’t noticed him. She ran towards the boy and knelt beside him, checking for any wounds. She began comforting him in a shaky voice “No, no no, don’t cry, it’s ok, hey, hey, look, it’ll be alright I promise, whoever did this will pay, alright? You don’t need to cry.” It was unclear if she was comforting herself or the boy.
The boy stopped crying and dried his own eyes and with a pitiful expression said “Thank you” *sniffle* “Thank you so much”. He quickly broke down into tears again. The officer, shaken from the sight she had just witnessed, and was unable to fully understand the situation. Perhaps if she had realized that the boy’s t-shirt was a rather unnatural shade of black she would have put two and two together. Perhaps if she hadn’t written off the emotionless, cold, merciless eyes she had seen in the boy's eyes as nothing more than a delusion, she would have understood that there was something very, very, wrong with the current situation.
The boy, who seemed to have no remaining relatives, was put up for adoption, and for the first time in his life attended school, for which he showed a prodigious level of talent. He quickly went into business and made a name for himself ruthlessly crushing opponents. It was that same ruthlessness that caught the eye of a certain head of one firm in particular: Triton Holdings, a large, international corporation dedicated to manufacturing and selling weapons. The allure of a lucrative position fresh out of school was far too much for the young boy to let pass.
It was here when the boy, now a young man, began to display his true talent: manipulation. He knew how people thought, he knew what they would want. He knew how to tempt them and how to entice them.
It is in the best interest of every business to sell more. How exactly do you sell more if you run a weapons manufacturing company? Simple. You start a war. Temptations of wealth and power work exceedingly well against dictators, and sweet lies of glory and pandering work well against republics. No matter who they are, who's in charge, there is always something they want. By sending an influx of discounted weapons into politically unstable regions, conflicts quickly arose. Morally, it was disgusting. Ethically, it was vile. Monetarily, it was successful. Triton Holdings had never had so much money before, and the company's success became Lance’s success.
It was on a business trip, a flight on his private jet to one of these unstable countries that ill fortune struck. His pilot, who trained for years in the air force, fell asleep at the controls. The plane’s AI system, which was state of the art, failed. The door, usually left open for idle banter with the pilot, was firmly locked. Needless to say it was quite the violent, albeit painless death.
The man was not disappointed by his death. He had nothing to live for.
Death wasn’t necessarily all that bad. When he opened his eyes, all he saw was a vast expanse of darkness. It was like gazing into an abyss. No good; It was like everything below his neck was immersed in concrete.
He could move his head a little bit, and took a quick glance at himself. Despite there being no source of illumination, he could see his body very clearly. He noticed that he was dressed in a suit and tie — in fact, it was the very same suit and tie he had died in. Oddly enough, he didn’t even feel any pain. Strange. He had thought dying would have hurt more. It was oddly peaceful here.
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You…YOU, YOU RUINED EVERYTHING. It was like being hit in the face with a flash bang. He was sure that if he was alive his ear drums would have shattered and begun to bleed.
IT IS YOUR FAULT, THE PEACE I WORKED SO PAINSTAKINGLY TO BUILD, GONE, BECAUSE OF YOU. BECAUSE OF YOUR GREED.
He was never a man whose arrogance got the best of him, but he was especially irritated now. He had died mere seconds ago and the first thing that he experienced was nagging? No, he was in no mood to listen to this. In a dull, disinterested voice he responded: “In all honesty, I don’t care…I mean, I wish I could say your existence meant anything to me, but it really doesn’t, and in my opinion, it is most likely because of your miserable, shitty attitude that things ended up this way. And besides, what kind of idiot would blame one person for a war? What about the people who bought the weapons? Humanity has always been a vile and corrupt cesspool. All I did was exploit it.”
His voice trailed off into the darkness. Nothing. Whoever was yelling was completely gone. Now that he had recovered from the shock, he had realized exactly how bad of a situation he was in. He was unable to move his body, completely alone, with nothing around him for as far as he could see. Not only that, he had pissed off whatever or whoever it was that had brought him here. Is it too late to apologize?
Then slowly, from the darkness, he saw a figure approaching. It was humanoid, thankfully, yet for some reason it seemed off. He squinted his eyes, and peered into the darkness, trying to make out more details. It seemed to be limping, dragging a foot along behind it as it hobbled towards him. It looked like a human, yet his instincts were warning him.
Goosebumps marched up his body. His rationality worked at a feverish intensity to calm him, all the while his heart beat began to skyrocket and sweat like shards of ice raked their way down his skin. He licked his lips, which had become awfully dry. They are just shadows, there is nothing to fear. Funny. He had never once faltered under the gazes of the most powerful people on the planet, yet here he was more terrified than he had ever been, because of a few shadows. As the figures drew closer, he began to notice… irregularities. Misshapen limbs, odd protrusions, broken postures.
Up until this point, he had been held together by his subconscious, yet when he saw this, he understood. He had an epiphany, an enlightenment if you will. The things that were approaching him were not human. No, they were something far worse. They were something that could only be described as nightmares cooked up by a desperate imitation of life. Monstrosities unfit to exist. And there were dozens, no, hundreds of them dragging themselves towards him.
He began to tremble like a beaten dog. He desperately wanted to look away, yet a sick sense of curiosity kept his gaze on it. His breathing had gotten ragged, and he was barely holding in the urge to vomit.
It’s just a dream, it’s just a dream, it’s just a dream, it’s just a dream, it’s just a dream, it’s just a dream, it’s just a dream. He repeated it to himself like it was a prayer. Yet the shadows grew closer. His resistance snapped, and his rationality shattered.
“STAY. THE. F*CK. AWAY. FROM. ME. STAY AWAYYYYY, LEAVE, GO HOME, LEAVE, GO AWAY! F*CCCKKKKK!” No matter how hard he screamed, the figure just got closer and closer. Finally, after the agonizing building of tension, he could finally make out the first figure of the approaching horde.
His breathing stopped. Utter silence, everything else had been tuned out. The only thing he was aware of was the pulse of his heart and the sight that lay before his eyes. He could finally see exactly what it was about them that was off. They were all brutalized. The closest one, a few meters away from him, looked like char. The entire right side of the body had been roasted black from heat. The skin bubbled and warped into a leathery substance, like the one you would see on burned food. On the left side, what looked like metal shrapnel had embedded itself. Some evidenced by the light they reflected and others by the holes they left behind. There were bodies behind it as well. Some crawled on the ground, pulling themselves with just their arms, their legs long gone. Their entrails dragged behind them as their stomach no longer held them in. Some looked like swiss cheese, their bodies riddled with bullet holes.
Centimeter by centimeter, the bodies dragged themselves towards him. Lance could only watch, paralyzed in fear until the burn victim, the closest, was only an arms length away.
“No, No, NO, NO NO NO NO NO STAY AWAY F*CK STAY AWAAAAA AHHHHHHHHHHH!” Right before the burn victim ran into him, it stopped. The corpse gazed right into his eyes, as if it could see the very depths of his soul. He watched as its hand lifted. He watched as the hand came down.
It felt like the right side of his body was being vaporized. He could feel his skin blister and turn to dust and his flesh boil. “....” He opened his mouth to let out a scream but nothing came out. The pain was too much.
His left side had the pleasure of feeling metal shards as they dug deeper and deeper into his body, some exiting from the other side while others buried themselves in his bones. The pain felt like it lasted an eternity, but in reality, or whatever reality this was, it had only lasted a few seconds. The burn victim’s body crumbled to dust and disappeared.
The pain, as if it was never there, disappeared, leaving only the man’s heavy gasps as evidence of what had happened. His head hung limp as tears leaked from the corners of his eyes. He was so shocked from the sudden pain and its even suddener departure that he had forgotten to breathe. Literally, his heart had stopped in his chest. The luxury of confusion however lasted no more than a few seconds.
“AAGGGHHHHHHHHHH!!!!” He let out a scream. He could feel a blunt impact to his chest. That in and of itself wasn’t that painful. What was painful was the shard of bone that had pierced his lungs. “Ugh… Ugh… Ugh.” He tried to breathe but he could feel blood filling up the areas where air should have been. Less and less air made it into his body. No matter how much energy he put into expanding his lungs, not a single morsel of oxygen seemed to make it into his lungs. He drowned in his own blood. He began crying, like a 5 year old who had just scraped his knee. Snot dripped from his nose and his body shook from the sobs. For 5 blissful seconds, he rested. Another hand grabbed his leg.
This time, it was grief. An overwhelming sense of grief and loss. So thick and cloying was it that it felt like someone had plunged their hand into his chest and was trying to rip his heart out. Lance began to weep, until finally he felt a cold, sharp pain in his mouth. BOOM. He could feel a bullet travel up and through his skull. He could feel as it ripped through his brain, every millisecond so vivid, so clear, and so, so, painful. Again, both the pain and the body disappeared, as if it was never there.
The man's head hung limply. He had given up. No amount of screaming would spare him from this. His previously dignified and arrogant persona was gone, replaced by a broken sniveling man.
“What happened to that mouth of yours?” The voice returned, but there wasn’t much he could say. What could he say? There was nothing to say if such pain was a punishment “Rather quiet now, aren’t you? Are you ready to listen now, or are you ready to keep running your mouth?”. He no longer had the energy to speak so he simply remained quiet.
“Perfect. Well, you seem to be quite aware of the damage you’ve wrought upon your fellow humans, so this makes it infinitely easier for me. You have killed millions, set peace back decades. You are in essence, a criminal, and this is now your new prison. All the suffering you brought, you get to experience personally. You have ripped apart families, so you will feel their grief and sorrow. Your weapons killed tens of thousands, so you will feel every bullet and every bomb. One by one, for as many as there are, you will feel their pain. You are a rather intelligent one, so you should be aware of exactly how long such a punishment could take. However, I shall offer you an accord, a chance to repent. For every being you brought suffering, if you can bring joy and prosperity, I will end your punishment here. Would you like an explanation?”
The man simply nodded.
“I am a goddess, in charge of multiple worlds. It is my duty to ensure prosperity, peace, and progress among them all. One of those worlds includes Earth. However, Earth is quite populated. More people, more conflict. That one planet has consumed nearly all of my attention for several centuries, and considering how you demonstrated how eager everyone is for war, it most likely will continue to consume my attention for several centuries more.”
“However, that does not mean time will not pass on these other worlds, and I must deal with all of them. Which is where you come in. Despite your…deeds, you are quite talented when it comes to people, and it is my belief you can apply those talents to bring good. Keep in mind that the choices presented to you are the only ones you will receive. Either you enter my service or you suffer for a very, very, long time.”
Silence
“Excellent.”