Tevun-Krus #34 - GothPunk

Mist Walkers - A Short Story by @LeighWStuart

We lost seven souls last night to drowning, despite the watchers. Indeed, one of the poor souls to follow his heart into the water was a watcher. Only the saints know how he managed to escape his chain.

Desperation lent him strength, I imagine. Inspiration to commit the saddest of crimes. Perhaps he broke it with a rock. Or he planned ahead. The mist walkers are relentless, coming again and again, saying the sweetest words, or so I've been told. And if it's not sweet words that sway their victim, they resort to trickery and guilt. Anything to bring the flock of the living into their fold. They know us better than we know ourselves, I fear. God, how I fear.

The scent of water on stones and fresh, growing grass perfumes the air this morning. It blows in from the mountain tops behind the tents and cabins. It blows away the sick-rot stench of bobbing bodies in the waves. White mushroom bodies. White marble eyes. By noon, the wind will surely change and the air will be nigh unbreathable. The same as every day since we fled here to escape the floods.

Colonel Geoffries tells his men to fish the bodies out. I sidle sideways to leave, but he catches sight of me and comes this way.

The wailing women come, of course, but a few men and children are with them also this time to mourn the dead. The noise is like sawing on my nerves.

We will all be wailing soon if we can't escape this intangible threat. Not even chaining watchers to the land around the camp can keep people from drowning themselves.

She hasn't appeared to me, yet, but I know that time is against me. We are in their web, the same as insects who flutter helplessly at the spider's silken strands, but the more we fight, the more entangled we become.

The lack of a beach still disturbs me. It shouldn't. I've been staring at the water line for weeks – four weeks and two days to be exact. There was no sand, of course, only a thickening layer of green slime. The other color here is grey. Slate grey mountain tops devoid of their former snow, a grey sky heavy with rain that I pray won't fall and the mirroring dead grey waters that have swallowed the world. In the first weeks, it regurgitated half-digested corpses, leaving them like macabre gifts on the green slime.

I listen to the water slap the rocks. Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock. I want to scream for it to stop.

The colonel motions for me to walk for him and we spend many minutes in silence, watching his men and boys rope the bobbing bodies and pull them to land.

Tick. Another body. Tock. My friend William slaps the rocks. I let the other people cry out my pain. The breeze is sweet with fresh grass growing in every available crevice.

"We should tear the chips out," the colonel says. He scratches his arm savagely, the movement revealed his wrist briefly, and the skin tiger-striped red and raw. If he continues like that, he'll reach the veins and the chip in his brain will be the last of his worries. "Go in with scalpels and tear the buggers out!" A sore near his eye is oozing. He scratches it.

"Without proper log out we might as well jab a hanger hook up our noses and tear out whatever it catches." I've told him time and again that surgery is useless so long as the chips are connected to the data base, but the man refuses to accept the simple truth.

"Better than throwing ourselves in the water to drown." Spittle flies from his mouth to land on the sea foam curling around the bodies.

I turn.

A crab crawls from William's shirt collar and scuttles to the safety of the water. I shudder to think it was feasting all this night. How have such creatures come so high so fast? Or did the floods carry them the same as it chased us to the mountains? I crouch to try and close his eyes, the strange thought that the sun must be blinding him, strikes me. No. The sun no longer blinds my oldest friend.